In order to embody That Girl or That Woman mindset and lifestyle, it starts with being content with repetitive boring habits that are implemented in a progressive way.
You need to challenge yourself just 4% more to make it attainable but slightly difficult. The idea is to become used to the habit, much like progressive overload with weight training. Increase the weight when it is no longer challenging. Increase the number of habits, when it is no longer difficult to sustain it.
As you may know, “overnight transformations” are just a gimmick and you cannot maintain it.
We are not just trying to be That Girl for a day, a week or even a season. We are here to continuously nourish her, so that she can build up our confidence, self-worth and unwavering self-respect when interacting with the world.
Below we will go into the boring habits and the discipline needed, as well as how to implement them in a progressive way to reach that goldilocks zone.
The Goldilocks Zone Explained
Goldilocks Zone: The zone where the activity is JUST RIGHT. It’s not an extreme of any sort; it has conditions that are sustainable. In this case, sustainable for the success of your habits.
- It is not too difficult where it seems impossible to complete or sustain for long periods of time.
- It is not too easy, where it doesn’t feel challenging enough or not progress is being made.
- It’s the perfect zone-where you feel just right in challenge and action.
How to find that Goldilocks Zone for your Habits?
When you’re starting a new habit, it’s important to keep behavior as easy possible so you actually stick with it–even when conditions aren’t ideal. Adding too much too fast, makes it easy for life to knock you off your habits when something unexpectedly happens. Or you just have obligations that may start to require more of your attention.
Either way, it becomes too difficult to sustain all the new habits you’ve been trying to balance with all that life throws you (especially days when you’re just feeling glum).
What is the Flow State?
A realistic approach to incorporate the habits is to do so one by one; in a progressive manner. Always keeping the goldilocks zone in mind. When you hit the Goldilocks Zone, you can achieve the flow state.
The Flow State, as mentioned in the book Atomic Habits, is the experience of being in the zone and fully immersed in the habit/activity. To achieve the state of flow, the task must be roughly 4% beyond your current ability. It’s difficult to quantify the difficulty but the core idea is to work on challenges in manageable difficulty. Something just on the perimeter of your ability, allowing for your motivation to be sustained.
Add little challenges to your day. If you want to review your expenses more, do so for 10 mins at a time (weekly).
1. Pick one to two habits that align with your goals (One semi-passive and one active).
For instance, my friend Charlotte decided to drink 1 gallon of water and walk for 30 mins (indoor or outdoor). Introducing these two new habits was an adjustment because Charlotte struggles with remembering to drink water, so she knew including this in addition to walking 30 minutes outside after work would be a change of pace but still doable.
2. Once established and it’s automatic in your routine, advance in a small way.
Either increase the “resistance” of the current habits or add the next one on.
Charlotte here would increase her walk to 45 minutes daily, and added another habit following her walk–making a tasty protein smoothie to replenish her macronutrients and her energy.
This is called habit stacking and essentially it’s using your habit momentum to add another habit on that complements the preceding one. Remember an object in motion stays in motion.
For me currently, it’s reading 10 pages before bed right after my shower. I walk 2 miles, shower, eat a yogurt bowl and cozy up with my book. Nowadays I’m reading self improvement non-fiction books as per the 75Hard Challenge.
3. Ensure you always have a handy way to track your habits with reminders.
I like to use the Everyday App so I can see what I was able to get done and what my streak is. It helps me remember especially when I want to see where I have been slacking or how many days I have been able to keep a habit going! It’s a color scheme that gets dark as you sustain the habit so I like that type of simple visual effect.
A System for All “Challenge” Approaches
Once you create this progressive system utilizing the Goldilocks Zone method of difficulty, you’ll be able to compound your habits, reach your goals and finally sustain the That Girl / That Woman lifestyle!
You don’t want just the aesthetic, you want the full embodiment. And it comes from training yourself and defining with great clarity all the habits YOU want to introduce in your life.
What the approach and system down, you can make the decision when and how to take on new challenges. If you’ve been progressively walking, maybe you can start a run one day. After incorporating a few runs weekly, you may look into a local half marathon. Those impossible events/challenges don’t seem so impossible anymore because you know how to budget your time and day to take on tiny changes for long term big success.
You have your system down and know how you work and how you should progress.
In Charlotte’s case, she started to create her own recipes for smoothies and started to use the blender to make mixes for healthy baking treats after her walk. She reduced her grocery bill, and started learning more about nutrition to make her own snacks. She lost some weight as well, since she wasn’t eating store bought sodium or sugar filled snacks. She much rather enjoyed her ritual of making her own healthy drinks and bites after a walk. She would turn on the oven, take a shower and come back to tasty healthy delights!
This entire article is about learning about your habit adapting pace and knowing WHEN & HOW to incorporate good practices that can bring closer to being the woman and life you have always dreamed about. You can be That Girl / That Woman, you just need a clear layered plan that works for your lifestyle pace.
