Allow me to give you some of the backstory behind the origin of the 12 Simple Habits.
About a year ago I was a having a catch-up with one of my personal coaching clients and we were discussing how he was struggling to get to grips with his health and wellness or to make any real progress with his training goals. At that point he and I had only been working together for a matter of weeks but already he was feeling a little frustrated by what he perceived to be a lack of results. While I was disappointed for him, in truth I wasn’t really surprised.
It was a pretty similar story to the one he had told me a month earlier when we had our initial consultation. During that first meeting we had, of course, discussed his training past, his injury history, his typical dietary habits and his current goals and objectives. He described how he loved going to the gym and training hard but in recent years was becoming increasingly disillusioned that, “despite his best efforts”, he wasn’t seeing the muscle tone he once did, was actually gaining body fat and generally felt less energetic and less fit than before.
I began by enthusiastically introducing him to my CORE 4 concept and the 4 pillars of health, wellness and performance (MOVE, NOURISH, REGENERATE & PROTECT). I illustrated how and why I personally derive all of the training and lifestyle protocols and practices which have served me and many of my clients so well, from this framework. He was interested to a point, but I could tell that he was, “tight for time” and keen to discuss his new training regime. I made a judgement call at this stage to dial back the conversation from the areas that he might consider a bit too fringe or less relevant to him, and instead offer my suggestions on how we could upgrade and enhance his training plan, improve his nutrition and take it from there.
To give it some context, this guy is in his mid-forties, always been sporty and had been going to the gym 2-3 times per week for the last 5 years in an effort to keep in shape and stay on top of his game. Up to this point in his life his metrics of ‘success’, in terms of health and fitness, were largely based around what he saw in the mirror, how his jeans felt and how fast he was able to run 5km. He was aware of basic ideas around nutrition, in particular the general notion of calories and the need for protein but, by his own admission, he never gave much thought or attention to his ‘health’ in the broader sense. He’d had several personal trainers in the past and had previously started and “failed” more 8-week-training plans and 30-day diets than he could remember.
He is married with 3 young children and commutes into central London every day. There he typically enjoys 12-14 hour, stress-filled and desk-bound, days in the office before either going to the pub for a “de-stressor” on the way home, or, on “good days”, to the gym. Here he would take out his frustrations of the day by smashing himself and some innocent dumbbells. Like many of us, his weekends were mostly consumed with valuable family time, and the occasional 5km run thrown in as an antidote to the occasional bottle of wine…… Fairly typical……
Anyway, back to the point and our catch-up conversation 3 weeks later. I realised that at this stage that if I started talking to this guy again about switching up his calories or macros or indeed increasing his training frequency or in tensity, in effort to move the needle, I was in danger of losing him. Not so much losing him as a client, but rather losing his attention (he’d heard all this before) or losing him further by setting him up on a similar course to those that had previously failed him. So, I decided now was the time adopt a different approach, whether he liked it or not. Risk alienating him, but rather, hopefully aid him!
So, I started by asking him about his sleep! What time he went to bed, what time he got up, what he ate before bed, how many times he woke in the night, how he felt when his alarm went off in the morning etc etc. After some initial hesitation he started to engaged and slowly began to consider the line of questioning and respond informatively. From sleep, the exchange moved on to stress, sitting positions, screen time and social life. After an hour-long conversation that could easily have doubled, we had covered the CORE 4 pillars in some detail and I had explained how these habits and protocols were all actions that I had built in to my own life over the years, or things which I was currently researching and/or experimenting with. He decided that he was not just willing to, but excited to, take a more holistic approach to his health and wellness in his quest to get in his best shape of his life and to stay there for the long term!
As we signed off with the intention of speaking again in 2 days’ time to formulate his new regime, he asked me if wouldn’t mind just popping down my Top 10 healthy habits on an email for him, so that he could immediately start to make some positive changes. Later that evening I sat down to do just that. Narrowing it down to just 10 was pretty difficult and given my CORE 4 concept is centralized by 4 pillars, it made sense to offer 3 suggestions within in each pillar, and hence these 12 Simple Habits were established. The next step was to add some content to each of the habits, some rationale behind the importance of each and the potential benefits associated to their implementation. The email that was supposed to take 10 minutes to ‘pop down on paper’, ended up absorbing the next few hours, but I can assure you it was worth every minute.
On receiving the email, my client printed it off and pinned it to his office board. He emailed me back the following evening, 24 hours before our scheduled follow-up, to tell me how he had already begun implementing 4 of the habits into his day and was now looking forward to getting into bed at 9pm, “for the first time since he was in school”. Suffice to say that that email became the catalyst for change in my clients life and today he walks around about 10kg lighter than this time last year, significantly stronger, healthier and definitely happier.
1 year on and the 12 Habits Checklist, is the same document that I share with all of my personal coaching clients during our consultation. It is the starting point on their journey and is used to help them identify some basic areas where they may be lacking, take back control of their health and wellness and build a foundation of good habits from the outset.
The notion of “good health” is a pretty ambiguous and very individual concept and is open to an entire industry-worth of interpretation and nuance. These 12 Habits, while not exclusive or absolute, in my view, represent the lowest hanging fruit, are applicable to most people and cover most bases on route towards creating a solid platform of health. Independently, but more powerfully, collectively, they are practices that are easy to adopt and implement, and once woven into the fabric of a daily routine, will quickly and significantly improve an individual’s state of overall well-being, fitness and performance.
Having witnessed the success of this simple checklist in keeping my clients focused on the most important things, while providing them with the challenge of incorporating as many of the 12 Habits as possible, I decided to write the 12 Simple Habits eBook. I wanted to share these simple ideas and concepts with as many people as possible, outside of those whom I personally coach, and felt in order to do so effectively I’d need to elaborate on each of the 12 Habits. To offer people the best chance of success, it made sense also to include some easy-to-implement Action Steps for each Habit. Thus, with 5 Action Steps per Habit, the 12 Simple Habits eBook now provides people with over 60 ways to make incremental improvements to their health wellness and personal performance and serves as a super valuable resource for many who have dowloaded.
Sure, some of the suggestions in the book may not be news to you, and may appear like stating the obvious, but all too often it is our desire for something new, fresh or more convenient that blinds us to the effectiveness of what we already know, or have heard before. If we were just to follow that advice or implement those habits on a more consistent basis, perhaps feeling better, healthier, fitter, stronger and more fulfilled would be far less of an optimistic dream.