7 Small Habits That Will Change Your Life Forever

Changing your life doesn't have to be massive acts. I took that magic pill and my life changed forever. I quit my job, I uprooted, I moved cities and I've never looked back. What I have found, it's about the small ones that if you do long enough consistently over a long enough period of time, stack up and your life looks totally different because of them. So I thought in this video, I'd give you seven of those small little micro habits that I've done that I saw a big change with. I'm hoping that you test run one, two of these, try these out for yourself and that they might just change yours as well. All right, let's go. Habits number one. This habit is so simple. I reference it in every video, but it has made a massive impact. How many times have you had an email hit your inbox or a text message hit your phone and you open it, you think about your response and then you say, oh, let me respond later. In the back of your mind throughout the day, you're still thinking about it sort of like if you go check your inbox again, you see it and you think about it and you're like, dude, I didn't respond to that. Should I respond? I'll just do it later. We do that with a lot of things, not just emails or text messages. The bill that you were supposed to pay, the dishes that now pile up and is a way bigger task and how do you handle it at once. Those little things stack up and though they don't seem like a lot, you're thinking about them, not just one time, but three, four, five, sometimes all week if you don't do it. What's the solution to all that and how do you get your mental ram back so it's not eating up the headspace in your day to day? I call this one touching, that as soon as you know you have to do something, you get that email in your inbox, respond to it right then when you open it instead of saving it and doing it later. When you don't procrastinate on something and you just do it instantly, you start reinforcing the idea that you're an action taker. You're not a procrastinator, that that's just a story that you told yourself that you can actually take care of things. You are on top of it. You're crushing it. That's how you build your confidence and that's how you build your productivity. Remember, if something takes less than two minutes to do, do it now. Small habit number two. So there's two major ways with habits you can benefit. The first is like this video, adding things in. But the second is removing bad habits that shouldn't be there. There's no judgment here. We all got them. Whether it's too much screen time, whether it's an addiction, smoking, drinking, adult websites, and this is more of a challenge. Pick one bad habit that you know isn't serving you at the highest level and make it your mission to try and quit it this year. Because just like habits can lift you up, I find that bad habits or addictions can really suck you down into some of the lowest levels. It's not always that the habit itself is necessarily bad and super toxic for you, but it's the secondary effect of how it makes you view yourself. Most smokers know they shouldn't be smoking or it's not good for their health. They're like, yeah, 20 times a day, 30 times a day, I'm literally doing something I know I shouldn't be doing and I feel guilty about it. Like that's the real toxic effect of a lot of bad habits is not necessarily the outcome of it, but it's how you view yourself at the end of it. But this point is what is the secret habits that you feel like you're hiding that's keeping you in shame or guilt? And how can you break it? Can you get resources? Can you get some extra help? Can you talk to someone about it? Can you just like double, triple down on the willpower and really take it seriously if that works for you? Can you get in a group if it's an addiction? Can you get in a program? Can you just go all in breaking that habit and watch the confidence come back into your life? Remember, we're picking one, we're not going after like 20 at a time, just that one habit that if wasn't there, you'd feel more free, lightness, playful. Habits number three. This next habit is something that if you've never done before, man, I think you're gonna get a lot of benefits from. You ever heard of vision boards? Now, this is typically where you choose five to 10 images or phrases or things and you put them on a physical board. Some people say, well, vision boards don't work. Yeah, because they're probably never looking at them. You gotta put this somewhere where you can see it every single day, multiple times a day. But what I've also found is how funny it is people who say like, oh, images are just photos, it's not gonna do anything. Well, they don't understand how advertising works on your subconscious. You know how many ads you're seeing a day? Tens of thousands. You know how susceptible most people are to advertising, myself included. I'll be watching an NFL Sunday and Jersey Mike has ads on and then 1 p.m. comes around and I'm like, you know what, babe, Jersey Mike's kind of sounds, give me a number six, Mike's way. So if you're letting other people advertise to you, why don't you advertise to yourself of what you want? Why don't you stop being programmed by other people and you program yourself with what you want and the dream character you wanna be? Where do you do this? You create a vision board. I call this a manifesto. In Metamorphic, we do not just one vision board, we do like two or three and we do these whole character creation and we go super in-depth in that process. It's like the secret sauce. So how do you make a vision board? Well, step one, you choose five to 10 images of what you want your life to look like. Everything went perfect for the next year, two. Where would you live? Who would you hang with? How would you look? What would you have? You put it somewhere where you see it multiple times a day, just like subliminal advertising shows you, I think it's the rule of seven in advertising, seven exposures before someone buys the product. So you need to put this somewhere where you're gonna see it hundreds, if not thousands of times. I put this in the back of my journal because I use it so much, I just flip there and I see it. By the simple act of looking at your goals and what you want every single day, I think your life's gonna look different. You're gonna prime yourself towards it. If you wanna learn more about our whole process with creating a character and really designing the manifesto, not just a vision board, but like super in-depth towards everything you want and how you can make that happen, I'll link down below Metamorphic, our coaching program. You can speak to one of our coaches for free, see if it's a good fit. I'll also link down our guide to creating a vision board if it's your first time. Small habit number four, I call this selective ignorance. Anything you can do to preserve your most precious resource, your mental bandwidth, your focus. Specifically talking here about current events, the news, politics, anything that has a negative charge around it. I don't think you're a worse person if you don't have an opinion on every single current event going on in the world right now. In fact, I don't think you're supposed to. That takes so much time, so much energy to be informed about every little thing. Most people are just addicted to the news. Fear has a very intoxicating energy behind it. I know this from my marketing background that if you put a headline that says negativity, gets more clicks than positivity benefits. And if you listen to tons and tons of news or politics, you get conditioned in the state of learned helplessness where nothing you do matters and the whole world's declining and it was better 10 years ago. Are you gonna be able to create art from that place? Are you gonna be able to create a life that you want from that place? Are you gonna be able to be in a good state for those around you in that place? No, because you think it's all going to hell in a handbasket, so why bother? I was reading in a book, Coddling of the American Mind. When they ask people, hey, are you in more danger today than you were last year? What do you think people said? People said 27 of the 30 years on average, oh, things are more dangerous now than they were last year. Things are worse now than they were last year. It's all like kind of declining. But what's crazy is things are objectively safer and better today than ever before. You have the least amount of people living in poverty. More people die from being obese than they do from being malnourished. When you practice selective ignorance, I think you're gonna find that even after a week, two weeks, a month of abstaining from all news sources, all politics, all current events, anything that's negative, just test it and see if your vibe is better. See if the conversations you have are more positive. See if you don't have that outrage button get triggered in you. See if you feel more present, more grounded, more inspired to think about you and what you wanna create and what you wanna contribute. That has been extremely useful for me. And if you hate it, you can always go back. Habit number five, bit of a story to kick this one off. I moved four years ago from my hometown, Seattle, to where I am now in Arizona. And the major difference I was blown away by, the water here, even if you filter it, it still has a funky taste. You can't get it all out because it's so hard. Driving by one day and we see this water store. We go in there and they sell these five gallon carboys. You put it under their faucet, you fill it up and then you take it home. But now you have this five gallons every time you want water, you have to go and pour it in. It's this big clunky process. Not to mention you have to lug these four, five gallon jugs. It's 115 degrees outside in the summer in July. You gotta lug them up to your second story apartment. You're already breaking a sweat. You're frustrated and it's 8 a.m. So one day I was just looking at this whole process and I asked myself a question. How can I throw money at this and solve this problem? I literally went online and did what I should have done from day one, but just had no clue it existed until I asked that question. I looked at water delivery services and I found one for 80 bucks a month. They do all the handling, they come to your house, they put the water there and you never have to think about it again. Is it more expensive? Yes. Does it save you all the frustration, your time, your energy, your mental bandwidth? Absolutely. I would pay double, triple just to save that. So this habit, this is kind of weird. How can you pay to solve your problem? How can you pay money to free up your time? What can you throw money at to make your life easier? I'm not talking about hiring a private driver or putting a private chef on salary. Just be willing to ask yourself the question, what can I throw a little bit of money at to free up my time? Meal delivery services, laundry, there's even sites like TaskRabbit that can put together Ikea furniture or anything you don't wanna do. Most people view their life through one currency, money. But there's also two more, time and energy. And so if you're only optimizing your life to save money, to have money, chances are you're probably sacrificing your energy and your time, which is why you want money in the first place, to spend your time doing what you love and to have the energy to enjoy it. How can you throw money at your problems and make them easier? Habit number six. How many times has it happened where you said yes to something, later on you know you should have said no to? Does that ever happen to you? Like you're on your way driving to something you committed to and you're like, why did I say yes? I don't wanna do it. Well, I did that too. I used to say yes to pretty much everything out of the fear of not disappointing people. I would say yes to going on like lots of podcasts that I didn't really want to or have the time to go on. One year I was feeling extra drained and I was doing like New Year's reflection. And so I picked up my journal. I wrote in the back of it, everything that I did that year, everything that I had said yes to, every commitment. Then I looked at what actually moved the needle in my business, what I felt energized by, what I just was excited about. Almost every time it was filming content. It was working with the coaching clients. It was improving the coaching program. So it hit me right there that the things I thought I was supposed to do to be quote unquote successful or to network or to insert the blank for you, weren't the things that were actually moving the needle and getting me further ahead in my career and just making me feel good, recharged. They actually made me feel drained. Be okay saying no to things. In fact, I want you to try this out. Make a no list. Literally things I have said no to. And every time you say no to someone or something, make a note in the back of your journal or your phone or wherever you keep this log. There's two benefits to this. The first is you can look back at the end of the year and be like, holy cow, look at all the energy I saved. Or I'm so glad I didn't do this. Or if you're like, you know what? I really regret saying no to that. Chances are you can always call them up and do that thing. The second benefit is I've found that people respect you a lot more when you say no. If the roles were reversed and you asked someone to hang out and they really didn't want to hang out with you, you'd probably be like, well, dude, don't worry about it. I only want to hang out if you do. Nobody wants to hang out with someone who doesn't want to be there. So then when you actually do say yes, you develop a sort of reputation for only saying yes to things you really want to do. That's way more fun to hang around. It's either a hell yes or it's a no. Now that might be a little advanced depending on if you're using that in business, because I think it's good to say yes to tons of opportunities at the start or your personal life. I think it's good to say yes sometimes and push through things you don't want to do. But if you feel like every single week, every single month, your whole life is just filled with things that you don't want to do that don't energize you, I think it's time for you to start experimenting with a no list. Habit number seven. There was a story I read about someone who had a dream. He would go in every single day. For 35 years, he worked this nine to five job that he was not a fan of because his dream was stockpiling enough cash so he could go out and sail around the world. So the day comes where he retires. He gets his sailboat, except there was one problem. After two weeks of being out sailing, he realized he gets seasick and he hates the whole experience. Now, I don't know if that story is true, but I think it illustrates an interesting thought. Had he tested his theory that I want to sail around the world earlier on in life, he probably could have checked it off and not had this like fantasy that he had to save to the end. Maybe he could rent a boat and realize I don't like sailing. Maybe there's something else out there or maybe I should switch jobs and do something I like instead of sucking it up for one day later down the road. The interesting lesson out of that is called two week tests. Tim Ferriss was famous for this in his book, The 4-Hour Workweek, where he called it mini retirements, that you give yourself a retirement of like a week, two weeks, three weeks, and do the thing that you've always been putting off for the one day. How can you bring that closer and just test it out? I have found a lot of benefit in committing to things, viewing it as a two week test instead of a, this is the line in the sand and I'm never going back all or nothing approach. So pick a hobby, whether it's intermittent fasting, try it out for two weeks. Don't say I'm never going back. You want to reduce your screen time or you feel hooked on Instagram or a certain app, try uninstalling it just for two weeks. You want to be healthier, maybe bike to work for two weeks. See if you like that better than driving. And you can always go back if you don't like it, but you're just going to try something out for two weeks. See how you feel. Reading is a great habit you can incorporate. And if you're looking to improve your life, here are five self-improvement books that actually worked. Check it out if you're feeling it. You want to keep the party going and I'll see you there. Thanks so much for watching. Stop settling, start living. See ya.