By Douglas Kruger
I have an etiquette question.
What happens when a merry gaggle of elderly gentlemen takes up encampment before your gym locker, and you need to get past them? …And they’ve spread their wares about before them like an exotic eastern market? And they’re all astonishingly naked, yet posed in levels of informality that indicate they are frighteningly unaware of what is dangling and where?
What’s the protocol?
I couldn’t find it in my introvert-soul to say: “Excuse me, several naked gentlemen. Could all ten of you and your bags and your camels and your tents, please part before me that I may acquire my juice bottle? Also, bloke number seven, not that I was looking, but I’d get that checked out, if I were you.”
Couldn’t do it. Instead, I sent my wife a message: Remarry and go on without me. I live here now.
Anyway, January at the gym is an epic time.
Several thousand newbies flood the doors, stake their claim on the cramped floorspace, then invent new and colourful ways to injure themselves. Which is fine. But they also hold up the bench-press machine while scrolling on their mobiles. Which is not.
It’s now February, and attrition rates are steep. If you joined as a New Year’s resolution, are you still going? If so, jolly well done! The benefits cannot be overstated.
In addition to all the usual rationales – greater vitality, weight loss, a classically sculpted and enviable derrière – there are even indications that exercise might ward off Alzheimer’s and dementia. In fact, some studies suggest it may be more effective than any other intervention.
So, keep it up. The sun will return soon enough. Your time to flaunt that sculpted peach at the beach is well within reach.
Until then, here’s a useful trick to ensure your discipline doesn’t wane.
Do not go only when you “feel like it”.
It’s hard at first, no doubt. Everyone feels that way. But I promise you it gets easier. It may be hard to believe right now, but it even becomes addictive, so that eventually, you genuinely want to go, and feel cheated if you can’t.
Until that kicks in, your best friend is a technique called pre-loaded decisions.
To pre-load a good decision, don’t leave it to chance. If, for instance, you go in the mornings, then the worst thing you can do is to wake up, stick the proverbial finger in the air, and test your emotional currents. Instead, pack your bags the night before. Set the alarm. When it goes off, there is no agonising over a yes or a no. The decision is already made. You simply pick up your bag and go.
It’s a surprisingly powerful little technique. And you can use it to habitualise any good habit, not just gym.
I came across a variation on this technique in the book Atomic Habits. Author James Clear argues that the most effective habits are not the hard work itself, such as the gym session. Instead, the trick is to make a habit out of the two-minute action that enables the work.
This is because, once you get there, most such pursuits actually turn out to be enjoyable. It’s the “getting there” part that presents the problem.
In his book, we meet a famous dance choreographer and instructor, who uses habits and routines to excel in her field.
She works out at a gym each morning for two hours, and explains that the habit is not training at the gym. The habit is hailing the cab outside her apartment. This is the inciting incident, the two-minute activity that paves the way and she has habitualised that part. It doesn’t matter whether she “feels like it” on any given day. She only has to do the first step faithfully. The rest follows as a matter of course.
What good habit would you like to introduce? And then, what logically happens just before it? Can you habitualise that part? Can you organise it in advance, rather than leaving it to whim?
Don’t fixate on the difficulty of the new thing. Instead, habitualise the inciting moment. That’s the key.
The best habits start small. Scaling goals down to two-minute habits increases the likelihood that we will stick with them. A goal of reading 30 books in a year is fine. But it’s more likely to succeed when you break it down to: Read one page a day.
And even more so when you place the book on top of your lunch box, or your keyboard, or your kettle, so that reading that page becomes a two-minute habit scheduled at a certain time each day.
Similarly, a goal to do yoga four days a week should be brought down to: Take out my yoga mat at this time, as a matter of course.
If you’ve already let it slip, no matter. Don’t stop. Label your lapse as a minor pause, not a full-stop, then take a deep breath, and start again.
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Douglas Kruger is an author and speaker, who lives in St Helier. His books are all available on Amazon and Audible.
