Weak Habits Create Weak Lives | The Sean Trace Show

Most people don't ruin their lives in one dramatic moment.

They do it slowly, one small decision at a time.

In this episode, I break down why weak habits create weak lives, how excuses steal your power, and the simple daily actions that build strength, confidence, better health, stronger finances, and a better future.

If you've been waiting for the perfect time to start, this is your reminder:

Start today.

#TheSeanTraceShow #PersonalGrowth #SelfDiscipline #MentalToughness #SuccessMindset #Habits #Motivation #Leadership #Mindset #SelfImprovement

Transcript

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I had this thought that came into my head today, and I wanted to make a video about it because it was something that I felt was needed to be talked about, and that's this weak habits create weak lives. Now, maybe a little controversial. I think that we have an epidemic of people with bad habits and lives that are a little bit soft. And I've been there. Most people don't ruin their lives in one dramatic moment. They, we, do it slowly, one small decision at a time. You know what? Today I'm not gonna go to the gym. I want to do this instead. Yeah, one excuse at a time, one bad habit repeated over and over again. Now, the same is true of the opposite direction. We can become stronger, and strong lives are built from small, repeated actions. What does that look like? It's the process of showing up daily. Now, one of the problems that I notice is that one of the things that I see most often with people that I work with and coach is that they're always waiting until tomorrow. I had a family friend that was dealing with a major health challenge, and they kept talking about tomorrow, next week. And here's the thing that I realized tomorrow is one of the most dangerous words in personal growth. It's really dangerous. Tomorrow I'll start the workout. Tomorrow I'll save money. Tomorrow I'll fix the relationship. Here's what happens. Tomorrow becomes next week, next week becomes next year. You put it off forever. So what can we do? Well, here's what I've learned the solution, start today. And this is really that simple. You don't want to put it off. You want to get back into shape, okay? Start today. You want to get your money fixed. Okay, start today. You want to fix your relationship, start today. You want to meet someone, start today. Now, how can we do that? Step one is stop looking for the perfect time. I see this all the time when I work with people on content. They're like, oh, I want to build my business and I want to get out there and make some content. I said, Oh, cool, let's get going. You know what? I just want to wait. Mistake number one. There is never a perfect time. You're never gonna be feeling perfect for that thing that you got to deal with. You're never going to have the all the stars line up to walk through that door. You just have to get into it. And sometimes it's messy. When I met my wife, life wasn't perfect. I just stepped through the door and both of us were getting out of relationships. Both of us were in the messy middle, and both of us were not, it wasn't the optimal time, but it was because we just started. When I recently saw that I was podcasting too much, I was podcasting at all hours of the day, and it was just wearing me out. So I told my assistant, I said, okay, 8 p.m. to midnight, Monday to Friday, that's when I podcast. Weekends, no. Mornings, no. I need that time for me. I need to go to the gym every day. And I blocked that out. And that was something because that was step two. Step two here is to take one small action immediately. The one small action that I was able to take was to change that timing up. Now it depends for you what that might be. Step two for you might be that one small action, I should say, might be opening a bank account, opening a savings account, talking to a financial planner, it might be getting a personal coach, whatever it is that can start you down that path. And to think about the one thing that's gonna make the most difference for you today. Now, once you figure out that one thing and you start working with it, you can start doing something powerful. And that is moving forward and building momentum. And you build momentum through action. So you don't, and that's again step three is to build momentum through action. You get that perfect time out the window and you say, I'm gonna take one action immediately, and then you repeat and you repeat and you repeat and you just keep going at it. And what you're gonna notice is that you start moving the needle and you start creating progress. I just recorded one video. I recorded two videos already today, one in the mall, one just before this, and now I'm filming this one. And then after this, I'm gonna change up my clothes, run to the gym, get a workout in, and film Goggon style while I'm working out. Probably not gonna be as cool as he is, but that's okay. One of the other problems that I often see is that the weak habits create this weak life is that people are living on autopilot. There's a lot of people, and I have been there at times too. Now, what does that look like? You know, most habits aren't chosen consciously. We go, we do the thing, and then we go home and pick the easiest route. Now, that easiest route might be a survival thing that we do to conserve energy, but it doesn't always help us when we want to move towards certain goals. And when we do those things unconsciously, they're repeated automatically. And the problem is that autopilot doesn't care where you're going, it only cares where you've been. So if you want to get back into shape or you want to get into shape, but you've never been there, autopilot's not gonna take you there because you haven't been there before. You have to build new habits, you have to build new directions, and you have to build a whole new plan. But here's the solution that you can have for this problem: the problem of living on autopilot. That is simply paying attention. Step one, to pay more attention, the first thing we have to do is to begin to notice your daily routines. What is it that you are doing every single day? And once you start to identify your daily routines, you can start to become conscious of what you're doing, right and wrong. Now, the second step in that process is to begin to identify habits that aren't serving you. Again, you begin to notice your routines and you begin to see what are the things that aren't serving you. I started to notice that I am spending too much money. But when my wife asked me, you made this money, my wife said to me, You made all this money this month. Where did it go? I sat there and I couldn't tell her. I couldn't think about it because it's in my bank stuff and I know I'm spending on business expenses, but I wasn't tracking things correctly. So what I started doing is I created a spreadsheet for every last thing that I spend goes into that spreadsheet. And it's allowing me to identify habits, spending habits that aren't serving me. And then here's step three: you replace them with better ones. If I'm spending $500 a month on some type of takeout food, I can start to identify that, notice it, identify it, and then replace it with healthier eating options, healthier dietary options. And that three-step process of beginning to pay attention, identifying things and replacing them is a powerful tool to get off of autopilot. Now, there's another thing that I've been noticing, another problem that often pops up and raises its ugly head. And that is something that I touched on a little bit earlier, and that is choosing easy over important. Choosing easy over important. Now, here's the thing: the easy task is usually available, the easy food. People talk about all the time that that quick meal that you order online, you know, and it seems simple, it's not helping you. And this is the challenge. The important task is usually uncomfortable. It's not always easy to do that thing, you know, cooking your own healthy meals. It can become easy once you learn how to do it, but it is often uncomfortable when you have to change into it. My father, when I was younger, was dealing with some health challenges and he had to change his whole diet to deal with that. And it was uncomfortable for our family, but it was the thing that was absolutely essential. Now, that's why people spend entire days busy but accomplish very little, is because they are trying to do the easy thing. Well, how can we create a solution for that? It's actually pretty straightforward. Do important things first. Now, this is creating a triage list where you look at what is the most important task. That's step one. Identify the most important task first. And you do the most important thing first. But you can't do the most important thing if you don't know what the most important thing is. And then once you figure that out, well, the rest of the stuff kind of lines up after that. And the reason that we want to do that is step two. You do it before distractions take over. At the beginning of your day, you're feeling fresh, you've got everything in your head clear, but you need to do those things before everything else in your life kind of comes in and just intrudes upon your space. And that leads to step three on this one. That progress that you get from doing the hard things first, doing the most important thing first, and doing it before you get distracted, allow you to get progress, which creates motivation. Now, motivation is fleeting at times, but when we start getting into that flow state, getting into that movement, getting going down that path, it becomes a lot easier to keep doing it. And you find yourself resisting doing it less because you're like, well, if I just pull that off, that really hard thing, and all the rest of the stuff I'm doing today is much more easy, I can get that done as well. So I hope you guys are feeling it right now. I'm in the flow and I'm feeling it too. And we're moving on to problem number four. And this is a big problem in a lot of people's lives. I've been there as well. People love to make excuses. Now, excuses feel good because they remove responsibility, they move it back and away from our space, but they also remove power. And that's the problem. The moment everything is someone else's fault, your future is no longer in your hands. So what do we do? This is the Jonko Willink moment. Take ownership. You gotta have radical ownership. Last week, I had an absolute mess up in my podcast team, and it was no one's fault but mine. Actually, it was everyone's fault. I had a hard drive that the team was editing on, and they were backing up on the computer, not onto the hard drive. So all of these videos were getting edited, put on the computer. Edited, put on the computer, not onto the external hard drive. Now the computer started having some problems, and what did I do? I thought everything was on the hard drive. So I said, you know what, guys, I think we just have to reformat the computer. I reformatted it before I checked to see if everything had been backed up. And we lost about six episodes of a podcast. Now, we were able to go and re-edit them. We have all the footage backed up, but we lost the final products and we went and then recreated them. But here's the thing: at the end of the day, whose responsibility was that? It was mine. That's it. At the end of the day, as the boss, it was mine. So, how do we go about creating radical ownership? Here's some of the steps that I use. Now, step one is stop explaining why you can't. Why can't you go to the gym? Oh, I can't do it because of this. I can't, my neck's achy. I have um a very painful rash on my neck because we have this bug called kinbankwang, all right, or the Nairobi fly. It's this little black and red insect that just looks benign, but when you crush this thing, it has a very corrosive acid in it, and it will leave these horrible lesions where this acid just eats away at your skin. I felt something land on me when I was in the bathroom, swatted it, and crushed this bug on my neck. Now I've got this horrible rash on my neck. It hurts. I can use that as a reason I don't want to go to the gym, but the reality is that's not stopping me. It's just one thing. And so I'm gonna start on to moving on to step two. Now, focusing on what I can control. I can control my effort, I can control the energy I'm putting into things, I can control the ability to step up. And that's part of the ownership I can take with that deleted hard drive. I own the fact that I can not control that those were deleted. Well, not now. Once they're deleted, I can't get them back. But I can control getting that computer fixed, I can control assisting the team to re-edit those videos, I can control booking the right people to get them in to edit those videos. That's stuff I can control. I can control the project management, but I can't control the rest. I can't control that they were deleted. Not now, it's gone. And if I obsess on that, if I try to, you know, point blame at other people, yeah, that doesn't accomplish anything. Instead, I gave the kid a hard time for not backing them up jokingly, and I gave myself an even harder time for not checking first. That's the reality. Now we can move on to step three, which is take action from there. Once we get those first two steps on, we we can really take the most important step of ownership, and that's taking action, figuring out what is it that you can do, and then doing that. For me, the action was fixing the damn computer that had the problem. The action was getting the editors to help me re-edit those videos. And once we get them back, once we get them re-edited, backing them up. It's stuff that you can do. But the most important thing, the people who truly succeed in life are the people who take action. And you need to be one of those two. Breaking promises to yourself. This is something that I do. I work at this and I'm telling you guys about all this stuff. But you know, I've been trying to, I am not a morning person. This is a problem. I am not a morning person. I have a hard time. Night times, I'd love to go to the gym. I love to exercise. I like to do things. But one of the challenges I have is I have been working on breaking promises to myself about getting up early and running. But luckily, I found a time that works well for me. But every time you quit early, skip the commitment, or abandon the goal, you teach yourself something. You teach yourself that your word doesn't matter. And over time, it becomes a problem because your confidence disappears. Like, I don't necessarily trust myself that I'm gonna get up early to go exercise or run. My sister-in-law is like, ah, we go running at 5:30. And both of us have a hard time with that. But it's not because you failed. The problem is you stopped trusting yourself. Now, what can we do? You have to keep your word. I do this really well with my podcast guests. I am very good at if I say something the other day, earlier this week or last week, I had someone that I miss scheduled. It was at 2 a.m. and I still showed up. I showed up at 2 a.m. to interview this person. And because the solution to breaking your promises is to keep your word. And you have to keep your word to yourself. So it's not always easy. You're like, I promise myself that I'm gonna run a marathon. Whoa, slow down. That's a big promise. Start off with smaller promises. I promise myself that I'm gonna put on my shoes and walk around the block. So that's step one: make a smaller commitment. Make smaller promises that are things that are gonna be more easy for you to do, to follow through with. Step two, this is really important. Once you make the promise, follow through consistently. You have to be the person who shows up and is consistently completing the things that you need to complete. And finally, step three, you start to build trust with yourself again. It's hard to do some of this. But one of the things that I noticed is that I tell myself, okay, I'm gonna get to the gym today. And I just show up and I find a gym that's close to my house. I find a gym that's easier to get to. And I set a time, a reasonable time. Seven o'clock is when I go to the gym. I get plenty of sleep. I was waking up at six to take my daughter to school. And because I'm still waking up that time, I'm trying to keep waking up at that time and doing some light meditation and yoga and things beforehand. And I'm starting to do this daily and build trust in myself again. I'm not gonna try to say I'm waking up at 4 a.m. every day and going for a 25 kilometer run, 25 mile run. That's not what I'm gonna do. But I can start small and making sure that I'm showing up in the gym, falling through consistently, and then building that trust in myself. Now, one of the things that I think is a big problem for people, and this is a problem with personal finance, it's a problem with fitness, it's a problem with a lot of areas, is that people ignore the compounding effect. Now, what does that mean? People underestimate what habits do over time. One workout won't change your life. That's the reality. One book won't change your life. One conversation won't change your life, but hundreds of them will. When you get to the gym a hundred times in a period of time distantly, you're gonna start to notice some healthy changes. When you do a hundred sessions of yoga, you're gonna start to notice some positive changes. When you start having a hundred podcasts, you're gonna start to notice some changes. And the solution to ignoring the compounding effect is to think long term. Now, how can we do that? Step one, focus less on results. Okay. I know we all love the results, we all love the flashy stuff, we all love the things that are out there that we're aiming towards. But what we really need to do is to focus on the journey. And that's step two is to focus more on the repetition, focus more on the fact that we are getting there daily and showing up. I'm not trying to look for the certain gains, I'm trying to just get to the gym. And what my my team is noticing, what my wife is noticing, what my family's noticing is that I'm starting to look more fit, that I'm starting to reflect that, that when I eat healthy consistently, my body reflects that. I feel that. And then we move to step three, which is really freaking important. Trust the process. It's not always easy to do. We get into our heads, we start worrying about things. But the reality is that if you can keep showing up, if you can keep doing what you need to do and you can believe and trust in yourself that you're gonna get there, and you know you've got a good plan in place, you can trust the process. I've got a plan in place for building my company. We are hammering at it. And the results slow but steady. But I know if we keep it up, we will get there. You just have to trust the process and continue to show up day after day. Now, I want to talk to you real quick about one last thing, and that's this. Success is really dramatic. I'm on my way. There's nothing dramatic that's happening, it's just the constant showing up. And failure is really sudden. Most lives are shaped by habits that nobody notices until years later. Now, this is the thing that I try to remind myself is that the person you become is hidden inside of the things you do repeatedly. The healthy person has done a thousand different little things to make them healthy. The person who is dealing with a challenge to their health that was something they could control got there because of tiny little actions that they did repeatedly. You can make the change. If you want a stronger life, build stronger habits. This isn't always easy, but it's something that you can do. You just have to remind yourself that if you put in the steps, you put in the effort, you will get there. All right, guys, I hope you have a beautiful day and I'll see you next time. All right, take care.