I still think of myself as an athlete.  Some may think I’m a bit delusional, but, in fairness, I have completed a marathon, a century (a 100 mile bike ride), a triathlon, and a handful of mini triathlons…but that was all well over twenty years ago…Now, I more resemble a middle aged working mom who spends an abundance of time sitting either in my office or chauffeuring teens around.  I don’t really look like an athlete, but more importantly, I don’t act like an athlete.

According to James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, the best way to change your habits is to focus on who you want to be – the identity you would like to cultivate.  Once you’ve established who you want to be, you can use other techniques to make it more likely that you will behave in alignment with that ideal identity.  I’ve been trying to encourage my inner Athlete to exercise more, but I also hold other identities as a Mom, a Psychologist and business owner.  Often these Mom and Work identities arise and exercise gets put off…and then put off again…until exercise is happening less and less often and I am no longer behaving like the athlete I once was.

Understanding your current daily habits can help you figure out where to fit in your desired habit, according to Clear.  For me, my morning routine is largely set up around my identity as a Mom.  As such, it’s important to me to be available and present with my two teens in the morning, I then need to walk my dog, and then I need to get ready and focus on work.  However, with the intention of changing my habits, I looked at my morning routine to see if I could prioritize regular exercise.

During the school year, I wake up at 6am to support my older daughter and see her off before she leaves for the bus at 6:30am.  I then get my younger daughter up at 6:45 am, make us breakfast, and take her to school at 8am.  Once I stepped back and thought about my morning habits, I realized that I have time to exercise after waking up my younger daughter.  She doesn’t really need anything from me until around 7:30am when I make breakfast and sit and talk with her.

So, remembering that I am an athlete, (I can hear my teen daughters laughing at this), I need to behave like an athlete, and I can use another James Clear strategy to do this.  The strategy is habit stacking.  I always get my daughter up at 6:45 am, that’s my habit, so I stack exercise onto that habit.  Stacking habits like this makes the desired habit more likely to occur because it is following something that is already an established habit.  Now, I do a 20-minute Peloton workout after waking my daughter and before I make breakfast. And guess what? It’s working. I’ve increased my exercise habit and, in effect, I am acting more like the athlete I want to be.

Try to remember, though, that you will have weeks where you fall off course – and that’s okay. Sometimes you will have a work deadline that requires your morning time, or perhaps your dog had diarrhea and woke you up every few hours for the past three nights in a row (this has been my week). Regardless, you just do your best and get back to the newly established behavior as soon as you can.  Clear states that every time you engage in your desired habit, you’re casting a vote for the identity – the person – you want to become.

– Julie Cappella, Psy.D.