For most of my childhood and into my young adulthood I had a habit identity that was closely tied with my perfectionistic tendencies. I had decided that if I followed a very precise prescription, I could be successful. For example, when it came to my faith or my dancing, my habits were tied to rules I created, the kind of thing that I refer to as ‘shoulds’ now.
This led to an impossible cycle and I ended up on the other end of the spectrum, staying safe and not trying anything new. In this episode I guide you through how to determine your own habit type, how to choose your ‘shoulds’ and identify the habits you might need that could transform your life. Spoiler alert: mine was sleep! When I uncovered this about myself it had a beneficial ripple effect, and I think the same is possible for you, too.
Episode 391 about Dangling Habits
About a few other things…
Do you struggle to create habits that stick? It’s not your fault. The truth is simple: you’ve been trying to form habits using methods designed for perfect robots–not real women living real lives. It’s time to change that. If I could help you gain confidence in creating habits AND guide you to uncover the ONE supportive habit to deeply care for yourself, could you commit 21 days to learning this method? The Sticky Habit Method is a 21-day course that revolutionizes the habit-formation process. It’s real habits for real women.
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TRANSCRIPT
Monica: Welcome to About Progress. I’m Monica Packer, a regular mom and recovering perfectionist who uncovered the truest model to dramatic but lasting personal growth. It’s progress made practical. Join us to leave the extremes behind and instead learn how to do something to grow in ways that stick. My old coaching program, the Progress program, is being turned into a full 12 month long program called Finding Me Academy, and you can be first in the know when it’s ready to open up by going to about progress.com/finding me Academy and getting on the wait list.
What is your type? Now, when I ask you that, I’m not asking romantically what your type is. That’d be kind of strange, wouldn’t it? I don’t really need to know it anyway, but I do need you to know what your habit type is. Let me back up and tell you why this even matters. We all have something I call a habit story.
A habit story is a story that we tell ourselves about who we are as a habit person, and it’s definitely based off of a lifetime of experiences of how we showed up to habits, forming them, keeping them, dropping them, bad habits included. Knowing what your habit story is, is not just for kicks and giggles or so that you can share that story at night over a campfire or or to get your kids to sleep, although it might definitely get them to sleep.
Knowing what your habit story is is so important because it helps you write a new one if your story is not working for you anymore. Let me tell you my own quick habit story. Growing up, I knew that in order to be a good fill in the blank, that there were certain parameters of behavior that would help me be good at that thing.
So if I wanted to be a good member of my faith, I knew what habits had to play into that, including scripture study and which moral habits around food or exercise or how I treated people are what I did with my money. If I wanted to be a good dancer, which I was passionate about, there were several habits that involved me needing to meet them in order to be a good dancer, such as how many days a week that I was in class and how long I was in class for, including outside of class, stretching, eating, sleeping.
I knew innately which habits I had to have in order to meet the metric of being a good dancer. Now, this was definitely part of every area of my life, and because of that, it was really easy for me to know with like a black and white rationale. If I was meeting the metric of these things, I was not a good follower in my faith.
If I messed up in one habit, not doing it to the exactness, like if I wasn’t studying my scriptures for 10 minutes a day, let’s say, then I was no longer a good follower of my faith. If I wasn’t able to stretch for this amount of time, then look, that habit’s gone too. Or if I ever ate something with sugar in it, look at me.
That means I’m just not gonna be a good dancer. So this, you know, there’s a lot of truth though, to metrics. Like it is true that in order to have something in your life or to be this kind of person you want to be, even within certain roles and responsibilities, there are habits that need to be in place to best support that role and those responsibilities.
But when we’re taking them to these like very black and white versions of these are the exactly what the habits need to be and how they’re done in this exact way, then we are setting ourselves, ourselves up to fail. And that’s what I did. I was constantly failing, not just at habits, but at being a certain person and fulfilling a role or a responsibility or a title that I wanted.
That meant that I was always on this hamster wheel of perfectionism with myself. But I really did a good job of being on the hamster wheel because on the outside it appeared that I was succeeding at like almost everything. I was able to run that wheel enough that I could put on the appearance until I crashed and burned.
As a young adult. Now, you’ve heard this story before, so I’m not gonna repeat it a ton except to say that’s when mental illness took over. Eating disorders, depression, suicidal ideation. And not only was I not able to not uphold the metrics to be a good student or to even be a, a good friend to others, I also knew that I didn’t.
I, I wasn’t any of those things anymore. Everything was stripped for me because I wasn’t able to have those habits. Then, you know, fast forward 10 years, I could show up in the ways that I needed to for my job, for some, some church responsibilities, for my husband, and even for some friends, but for myself.
My habit story evolved to better safe, to not try, like there are some shoulds you can do. Of course, like with exercise, I still was always a diligent exerciser, but not in good ways either. I, there were shoulds that I could. Take on and uphold because doing away with those shoulds would just basically make me garbage.
And that was still involv involving things like exercise and spiritual study and making sure I was, you know, showing up to those responsibilities. But for myself, outside of it, like other habits that I maybe wanted, whether they’re goal planning or working towards a career, like in habits that needed to be a part of that, or reading again in my life, like those things, it was just safer to say, you know what? You can’t do the all or nothing. It didn’t work for you. You crashed and burned. You almost lost your life. You had to start over your life. We’re not gonna go there. We’re not gonna go back. We’re not gonna do that. And then for 10 years, my habit story was I’m a non tryer, I’m a non finisher.
I’m lazy. It’s just too difficult. It’s for other people. It’s for those amazing superhuman superhero caliber of women who can do these kind of habits at this kind of rate. In being able to tell the story, I can make sense of it better. Just like when you were dissecting any story out there, you can identify the threads in there.
And for me, it’s clearly the all or nothing model that I was following and how it was not healthy and how it was not leading to sustainable progress in my life. And I can see that now and I can see how that relates to the way I viewed habits and habit formation, and also how I viewed my capacity to form and keep habits.
Because the biggest reason why knowing your habit story matters is it helps you see what you see in yourself. As a habit person, what type of habit person are you? First 20 years of my years of my life, I would definitely have said I am a diligent habit keeper. And the second 10, I would say I am uncapable and unreliable.
And having those identities absolutely affected the way I was able to show up to forming and keeping habits. It is the same with you and your habit story, so, What is your habit story? If you were to sit down and you were to have a chat with me and say, Monica, here’s my history with habit formation. I think you’d be able to identify certain threads that are interwoven throughout your story of not only how you viewed what habits are, but also how you viewed yours, yourself as a habit person, and how that identity of a habit person impacted your ability to then show up to habits as kind of a cycle.
Maybe you could try that right now. Just for a minute, can you take a deep breath and pause this podcast and just think to yourself, what’s my history with habit formation and how is that my habit story and how has it created a habit identity in myself and what. Would those answers be?
Now I have talked to many women about their own habit stories and as part of this work, I’ve been able to pinpoint four general types of habit identities that women take on because of their past history with habit formation and keeping habits. And I teach these in great detail in my courses Sticky Habit method.
But what I wanna do now is introduce you to these habit types so that you can begin to see what they are for yourself. And I have something fun to offer you too. And then I’m going to tell you what we want you to take on instead as your habit identity. So the four habit types are something I call habiteers.
Do you guys remember The Mouse Musketeers from forever ago growing up? Habiteers is a sort of play on that. It’s just how you see yourself and how your behavior matches that identity in you. The fourth habit types are the martyr, the dropper, the overachiever and the dangler. The martyr is someone who sees habits as balls and chains.
In other words, shoulds in their lives. The martyr only lives by the shoulds. They’re like, well, I need to exercise is what good a person does, or a good mom always makes this kind of food, or a reader reads this much and this type and this, these types of books. So, okay, the martyr. Believes that habits are balls and chains.
In other words, shoulds. A lot of us can have that habit type. The next habit type we want to go into is the dropper. The dropper is someone who thinks that habits are routines, and because of that, they tend to drop their habit. Pretty quickly. So when someone wants to work on a habit, they think, oh, I’m gonna have this habit of, of, of waking up early and exercising and getting ready and meditating, and you’re like, that’s not a habit, that’s a routine.
And that is why you have been a consistent dropper of habits because you think habits are routines. A series of habits. That’s what routines are. A series of habits placed together during a certain time. Of day. So are you a dropper? Are you someone who has consistently mistaken habits for routines?
The third habit here is the overachiever. This is someone who believes that in order to form habits, you do so through a shoot for the Stars strategy. You can be someone who absolutely believes that habits are not routines, but you can still shoot for the stars with that habit by doing something like this with meditation. Let’s say you want to start meditating and you decide this is how you’re gonna do it.
You are going to meditate for 30 minutes a day. Overachievers only know about the ideal versions of their habits, and that’s what they are hellbent on implementing right away. And because of that, they also can become droppers. They drop their habits altogether. And the fourth and final habit here is the dangler.
The Dangler believes that habits can be magically inserted into your life without much specificity. I did a whole episode on the dangling habit, and I’ll link to it in the show notes. A dangling habit is a habit that is not attached to another already existing habit. This means that you decide you’re going to have a new habit, but you don’t get specific about exactly where you’re going to input it in your life.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t have flexibility. Of course, you will have some flexibility in terms of timing and length and all that When you have a good habit installed, it just means that you don’t have a plan in place about a general time of day. Let’s take that meditation habit I I just shared with the overachiever.
Even if you make it a simpler version, maybe you meditate for one minute. If you say, I’m going to start meditating tomorrow, that’s a dangling habit. It’s not specific enough. It’s not attached to anything else. Now, if you want to know what type ofer you are, I will have a free printable for you. It is a personality quiz, just like in those, I don’t know, teen magazines from the nineties, maybe even the two thousands where you could go through and you could see what type of whatever you were.
I, I did these a lot online with Harry Potter. Like what house are you in? What Harry Potter, Potter character are you? It’s the same kind of thing here. You take this fun quiz, it’s informal, and then you find out at the end which of these habiteers you gravitate to more. I will link to where you can get that for free in the show notes, but you can also just go to about progress.com/habit type.
Once you know your habit type, you’ll be able to better understand why you keep failing at habits. It will act as information that can empower you to do things differently, and as part of doing habits differently, you will take on. A brand new habit story and a new habit identity. There’s a specific one I want you to take on as your new identity.
I’m going to teach you all about that next after the break.
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So if you’re ready for improved, Sleep for your kids and yourself. Go to hatch.co/progress to get up to 15% off and free shipping. That’s hatch.co/p r o g r e s s hatch.co/progress. A quick recap. We talked about the importance of knowing your habit story as well as identifying your habit. Type your habit here.
Now I want to just emphasize something that is really important about why we don’t want to have these habiteers as our habit identities. It’s largely because they are based on our failures of behind the ways we’ve been showing up to habit formation and having an identity based in a failure or what we can perceive as fails, it’s not good. I don’t think I have to even explain that very much more. So what are we to do from here? First, we get to give you a little bit of hope. Habiteers do not have to be your solidified concrete habit identities. In fact, they become more of tendencies as you take on a better identity, one that embraces failure, and even these habiteer tendencies as part of the process of forming habits that stick. I call it a revolutionizer to introduce this habit identity to you that I want you to take on. I’m really excited to be sharing an excerpt from one of the lessons in my full course, the sticky habit method. The sticky Habit Method teaches you how to form habits that stick and all outside of perfectionism.
It’s designed for busy women who have limited time, low energy, and very little support. That means each lesson is very, very digestible and also doable. Each of the lessons are less than 20 minutes in length, and by the time that you finish the course, you leave it with a habit in hand. One that is actually created as you learn the method and then you go on from there, both with this method and the experience forming that habit to form a lifetime of supportive habits to come.
If you like what you hear in this preview, then go check out the course@aboutprogress.com slash sticky habit method. And now, before I share the rest of my information on how to be a revolutionized via this preview, I want you to just know that I record the class on camera. So you’re gonna hear an audio extract from that, and that’s why it’s not, it’s like crispy, crisp, and podcast sounding.
Let’s do it.
When in the past have you experienced habit fails? Maybe it’s with a specific habit that keeps coming up for you. For me, sleeping is one, is one that I could always say, yep, I have lots of habit fails with sleeping. Or maybe it’s one more recent that you can bring to mind. I wanna teach you something about habit fails because you will experience them.
In the middle of this course, and even after you learn this method and are installing new habits and you’re building on from what you learned in this course, you will still have habit fails. It is part of the process of small wins, building. Over time, there will be failure. Failure is not fun. And I’m going to teach you actually what to do with these habit fails more specifically in module three.
But I wanted to tell you about habit fails right here, right now, both so that you can analyze your past habits and see where you’ve gone astray, what tendencies were showing up for you, what habiteer types were you leaning into. And as part of that, I want you to own this. And it’s so clear, and I say it many times in this course, you are not broken.
Your methods are broken. When you can look back at your old habit fails and identify these habiteers showing up. This is when I want you to take a deep breath and tell yourself it’s not me and I can fix this. Especially when you learn the sticky habit method. Instead of you allowing any of these habiteers to become your full habit identity, like the way you see yourself, I’m all or nothing person, or I’m really lazy, or I don’t try anymore, or I only do what other people want me to do.
I want you to become this type of person. Are you ready? A revolutionizer. A revolutionizer, redefines habits and the habit formation process. It’s the ways that we’ve learned in the past a revolutionizer both believes in and practices the process of small wins building over time. A revolutionizer learns from their habit fails, and a revolutionizer follows the sticky habit method to form supportive habits that stick for the season they need them in.
I want you to be a revolutionizer before I teach you all about the sticky habit method. I first want to hit on the biggest obstacle I think women face as they are beginning to learn a new way of showing up for themselves. And it’s one that we can clearly see in many areas in your life, but habit formation is no different.
It’s the shoulds. We already spent a little bit of time in this talking about thee type. The martyr and shoulds are those external pressures that we then internalize. Here’s where this ties in. What if there are some legitimate should habits? That we need in our lives. My biggest example of this is sleep.
I have always been a night owl. This is just how my own circadian rhythm worked for a very long time. I always attended to be more creative at night, to think deeply to get things done, but this really messed up my life when I was a young mom especially, and yeah, I was getting up at night too. Shortly after going to bed late at night to care for those kids and finding myself, having a really hard time functioning as myself in the morning during that bubble era of my life, especially, I felt like night was the only time I would allow myself to have time to myself.
That’s another should creeping in, right? And because of that, I would simply prolong it so I could actually feed that, that well of empty time for myself and try to give myself the energy I needed. And spoiler alert, that does not work if you are an empty leaky, well, no amount of things you throw in there.
No amount of like me time at a only a certain time of day is, is gonna work. And that’s a whole other topic. This is why supportive habits matter. So anyway, I could pretend otherwise, but I knew deep down my lack of sleep was preventing me from feeling like myself and being able to bring that person, that self to my responsibilities at the time.
But my friends for years, I resisted. This should majorly It is a big should out there, right? Like early to bed, early to rise. We all know this. This is one of those big things that everyone wants to work on better, going to sleep earlier, getting up earlier. It’s a giant should. Now, I’ve resisted and resisted and resisted that should, until two things happened in succession that helped me see it was now time for me to own this should, and I’ll teach you more how I did that.
The first is family pictures. It was just my family. We got our family pictures and by then I think how old was my baby? He was maybe seven months old. This is my fourth child and he was about seven months old and he was sleeping pretty well at night. He was maybe only waking up once a night, which is pretty good for my kids.
None of them have been great sleepers maybe cuz I get that for me, I don’t know. Anyway, he was sleeping well, but I still wasn’t, I was still prolonging that nighttime for myself. To try to fill that empty leaking well of giving time to myself. And when we got the pictures back from my amazing photographer, who was a dear friend, very talented photographer, I was like, who dat, like that is not me.
That woman in those pictures, I don’t know who she is. I looked exhausted. I looked exhausted. I looked maybe 10 years older than I did in our year family photos a year prior when I was pregnant. So vanity, vanity alone showed me, okay. I need to get a hold of this sleeping habit. The second thing that really helped me see, I had to choose the should, was that I had a business coach, my first business coach I ever hired after my fourth baby.
I was ready to make my podcast into something that could truly help support my family, which is something I wanted and needed and still am working on too. And we were creating a lot of goals together and he had me write this whole list. My vision of where I wanted to end up. And he also helped me, you know, itemize those things and put them in priority lists and all of that.
So he did a lot of work. And then he looked at me and he said, okay, Monica, when you look at this list, what is one thing you know you need to do that would help make all of this possible? And I took a deep breath and I looked at him and I said, sleep. And it wasn’t even on my list. But I knew deep down that if I wanted to be able to show up to this work and make it be helpful to my family, I needed to sleep better.
So when there is a should in your life that you know you are ready to prioritize. How do you do that? How do you make it feel different so that you can do it differently? I wanna give you hope. Shoulds can be chosen when you choose a should it changes the way you feel about this should habit, and it also changes the way that you form it because it is more about support.
It’s about caring for yourself deeply. And later on when you apply these to responsibilities too, when you apply the same thing, it will feel different there too. And I have countless examples, including my least favorite chores, like laundry and sweeping the floor, how those feel different for me when I choose them for again.
For now, we’re focusing on your own support and self-care for this course. Once I truly chose this new sleep habit, I was able to make better progress with it. Because I could see my past habit fails with it with clearer eyes. I was able to remove the pressures around it, and I was able to find for my own way, creating a way of prioritizing my sleep.
That worked better for me, and I also knew a better process too. Again, coming up in module two, the method and our responsibilities, especially we know what shoulds look like, they can be more chore oriented or tasks we dread at work or things that we have to do around town, like errands. But when it comes to supportive and self-care centric habits, there are most definitely going to be some that are more should based, like external pressures that you know you are ready to prioritize.
What are those for you? For a lot of women, it’s exercise. The ways they’ve done it in the past have been very should centric. They have to do certain types of exercises for certain amount of times, for certain days of the week, or else it doesn’t count. If you were to just use this as an example and choose this should of exercise of movement, and would that help you?
Could you see it from a different way? Could you be able to objectively look at your past failures with movement and be able to see, oh, this is where I went off track. And then from there, could you better choose how to make movement work for you? I know you can, maybe others should. Habits for you are feeding yourself more regularly, like making meals for yourself during the day, maybe.
Reading again. Maybe you all have always been like, oh, I should be reading again. And because of that you have to do it in certain ways and that gets in the way. That was one of them for me. I had lay miserable on my nightstand for four years because I couldn’t get through it. I wouldn’t allow myself to read other things, which meant I just kept not reading.
Once I really chose that should, I started to read books that were like Twilight or Hunger Games, other light kind of reads that made me enjoy showing up to reading. When you choose a should, you’re able to show up differently. So what could that be for you? One last thing on choosing A should. When you choose A should, it becomes deeper for you.
It’s more about the why. Then the what and the how. It becomes less of I should and way more of a I choose to. As you learn the method in our next module, I’d actually encourage you to not start with a should. It’s okay to not begin with a should, but I still wanted you to have that knowledge as you move through the method because some of you might still have to choose a should for your self-care supportive habit that you’re gonna work on as you learn to install the sticky habit method.
And most of us, me included, will have some shoulds. We want to choose as we continue to build after we leave this course. This is what revolutionizers do. They choose shoulds that will serve them. They also choose how they’re going to show up differently, and that’s what we’re gonna learn next. My friends, I am so excited.
I feel like I’ve teased this enough. This is officially the end of module one, all about how we redefine habits and how we form habits. And we’ve chosen to become revolutionizers, which means in module two we are going to learn how to revolutionize our habits. You will finally learn the sticky habit method.
There’s so much more coming. I’ll see you in module two. I hope this episode gave you the hug and kick in the pants you need to grow. It was also fun for me to just, I actually didn’t have like notes in front of me. It was nice to just kind of s sit here and teach without worrying about it all sounding perfect, which is always good for me to practice what I preach.
Cuz sometimes it’s really hard, especially when I’m now getting back into podcasting after a three month break and I have been feeling kind of insecure and a little bit rusty, so. It’s feeling good to be feeling more like myself behind this microphone. A as a quick reminder before I share the progress pointers, if you want to get that personality quiz to find out whicher, you are, you can find that through the, the show notes and it’s totally free.
Or just go to about progress.com/habit type. Here are the progress pointers from this episode, and these are the notes I took, so you don’t have to. Number one, knowing your own habit story matters. It helps you make sense of how you viewed habits and how you formed your identity with forming and keeping habits.
This helps you decide how you want to now rewrite your story. Rewrite your story. There we go. Number two, there are four general habit types or habit tears that help form that identity. The martyr. The dropper, the overachiever, and the dangler. What is your primary type? Number three, these types become more tendencies and you can work with them to instead become a revolutionize.
Number four, a revolutionize redefines habits and the habit formation process. They practice and believe in the process. They learn from. Their habit fails and they follow the sticky habit method to form supportive habits that stick for the season. They need them in. Number five, start by tracking what habit fails, have defined how you view your own habit identity, and what shoulds you would like to choose in your life.
Okay, my friends. That is it for this week’s episode. If you would like to work with me more than just on habits, if you want to get coached by me in a community set setting where we also learn a whole lot more together, then you need to get on the waiting list for Finding Me Academy. That will be opening up this fall, I hope.
This is my coaching community and it’s also my coaching program that has now turned into a full 12 month long program That’s. The plan and those on the waiting list will get to get in first before the general public because I plan to cap the spots. That wait list Sign up is linked for you in the show notes.
You can also find it at about progress.com/finding me Academy. Thank you so much for listening. Now go and do something with what you learned today.
