I’ve recently been doing health coaching with a dear friend.

Today on Alive in the Fire I wanted to share one of the tools I taught her, with the hope that it can be helpful to you, too.

When you’re making a change, take time each week to reflect on your behavior.

The practice is to step back and reflect on WHY— whether you successfully complete the task or you fail to complete it.

For example:

Say you’re wanting to start up a cardio routine. Your goal is to bike or run 3 days a week for 30 minutes. Historically you’ve had a lot of resistance to exercising, you don’t enjoy it, you generally make excuses and don’t end up doing it. Or, you start and you get a routine going for a week or two, but then you end up stopping.

Pretty common cycle, I’d say.

In order to increase your chances of success with keeping the new habit, try this:

Each week at the end of the week, reflect back on what happened. Write, talk or think about the days when you successfully completed the cardio and got your exercise in. Why was that? What made you feel motivated? What helped you succeed?

What was the why behind your actions?

Then, do the same for the days when you didn’t complete the task. What was getting in the way? Why did you fail? Was there a fear, hesitation, block, or old pattern that surfaced?

For both cases, why did you do what you did?

The more you can begin to understand this and notice your own behavior, the more you can implement the change by getting to the deeper layer of why you do (or don’t do) things.

PS Bonus points if, when you do your reflections, you can also spend a moment extending kindness toward yourself whether the outcome was successful or not.

Try it out and let me know how it goes. I’d love to hear ;)