How To Get Fit With Habits That Stick

Discipline gets all the credit, but it is the wrong tool for the job of getting you fit for the rest of your life.

If you have ever tried to “just be stricter” with workouts, nutrition, sleep, or even scrolling, you already know how it ends: a strong start, a busy week, then a full stop.

I share a conversation sparked by a futurist friend who asked how I help my clients create long-term discipline for hard things.

My answer is simple. I do not teach discipline.

I teach habit formation and systems design, because habits is what creates long-term results that feel effortless and therefore easy to maintain.

Once a routine is wired, it feels easier, almost like cheating, and it stops stealing attention from your work, family, and goals.

We get practical with a science-backed habit “recipe”. I explain how cues and rewards lock in routines and why positive emotion and reinforcement speed up consistency.

We also cover fallback plans so you keep the routine alive when you travel, get injured, or cannot do the perfect version.

If you want sustainable fitness, better energy, and mental clarity without living in a constant grind, press play.

Subscribe to Change Wired Podcast, share this with a friend who needs a smarter system instead of discipline that fails every time, and leave a review so more people can find the habit-first approach.

Transcript

Why Discipline Fails Long Term

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Hey guys, and welcome back to another episode of Change Wired Podcast. My name is Angela Shorina. I'm your host. I'm your partner in personal and collective transformation, your executive master health coach 360, and just someone who is really passionate about every single day looking into all different strategies, how we can unlock and use more of our potential in our daily life to achieve our goals, to build our visions. So we get to live our most extraordinary lives, feeling the most alive while also bringing the most value and service into this world. Today, guys, we're gonna talk about discipline, we're gonna talk about getting fit and perhaps getting into the best shape of your life, physically, mentally, financially, and how most of it actually has nothing to do with discipline.

A Futurist Asks The Best Question for Building Your Future Self

SPEAKER_00 1:11

A couple of days ago, I had a call with a futurist. I have a few friends who do this for a living, which I'm like quite fascinated with someone who has a profession of being a futurist. Sounds kind of cool. But anyhow, so the call. On the call, we discussed different ways how people approach future casting, future creation, or creating building certain goals and visions, and what some strategies are, and where he considers future casting or future forecasting the where he cons considers it goes wrong and what how to do it better. But then we switch to something that is more familiar to what or to what I do, even though by the end of our conversation I realized I might be this practical futurist helping people to build and create the most profitable future through daily actions. And my friend asked me this question, getting, I think, into the age where he has a lot of ambitions still, but his uh health is not necessarily as supportive as he'd like it to be. So he wanted to figure out how to uh improve his health, his fitness to fuel his uh ambitions and the vision that he still wants to build for his life or his career for his impact. And he asked me a question, like discipline. Is it really the thing? Is it really sustainable? Is this really what you help people to build, to achieve, to create? How do you help people to keep going day in and day out? Like that grind, that hard work. I don't think it's sustainable. What do you usually recommend people to do? And what I realized at this point, I I think I realized it some to quite some time ago, that I don't actually uh teach discipline. The only time I talk about discipline is to say I'm the least disciplined person you probably know. And when people see the way I look and that I'm so healthy or quote unquote strict with my diet, with my sleep regime, with my training, some people assume that I'm disciplining myself into it or that I don't eat ice cream or sweets and don't do a lot of things that people consider temptations and vice. And again, people think that I somehow discipline myself into it, and that when clients come to me working on their health and fitness, their eating habits, their drinking habits sometimes, all these habits that they would like to do less of or eliminate to move towards this aspiring vision of self and their life a lot faster, versus getting in their own way of achieving their goals. So I never, like never in my entire 18-year coaching career, I knew my clients said, Angela helped me to become more disciplined. My clients say things like, it feels like cheating. Like they do all the work and it feels like cheating. Like, how is it? What kind of magic do I do? Discipline. You know, the discipline, the kind of discipline you think about when you think about forcing yourself every day to do something you don't want to do. You can sustain it for a week, you know, with the greatest energy and motivation, January 1st or your birthday, especially if you are in your maybe 39th year or 49th or 59th, you know. In those numbers, people actually start doing all kinds of stuff and find discipline for things they didn't know they had. Or also at the turn of the decade, people like, yeah, I'm gonna run marathons now and go climb, I don't know, mountains. But anyhow, uh discipline is not a sustainable thing in a way most people think about that. And I'm speaking from 18 years again in coaching, helping people to achieve goals that they struggled with for decades, and smart people, people who achieved a lot in other areas, but somehow uh thought they didn't have enough quote unquote again discipline to achieve their desired fitness levels or health or energy, or there's sometimes even relationships, and just sticking with the behaviors that they know are that they know serve them the best or that vision of self. But anyhow, what science and research and every single expert on motivation and greed, what they all tell us these days, it's this forcing yourself to do every single day something, it's not sustainable. Your life, your energy, your mood, they fluctuate so much and you get overwhelmed and you're bombarded with so many things that to imagine that someone is gonna be disciplining themselves through all of that for years and decades needed to maintain, for example, the peak state of health that you want to achieve. It's I don't even know who who really believes in that. You can't sustain it usually for even two months. The the research shows that all New Year resolutions, for example, are done or dead by February. People make them and have some discipline for sometimes even a couple of months. Usually most people drop out actually by the end of January or even at the two-week mark. Discipline is not sustainable.

Habits Live In A Different Brain

SPEAKER_00 7:21

Habits are. And the difference between disciplining yourself into something and making decisions every day about forcing yourself to do something and habits is that they live in different parts of your brain. Habits live in the part of your brain that automates and makes things effortless. You become this kind of like Pavlov's dog, if you know who Pavlov was, and he did a lot of experiments on conditioning of animals. When he would drink a bell and bring the bring a dog food, and then he would ring a bell and do that again and do that again and do that again, and after a while he would drink a bell and the dog would salivate and uh the sort of the almost pre-digest stuff, and there was no food. But the dog behaved like the same way, whether there was food or not. But the whole point is once something becomes a habit, whenever something triggers that or uh forces or there is a cue reminder of some sort, it's kind of like pushing a button on your phone that activates a program. So habits work the same way. There is a trigger, you see something, you hear something, you feel something, somebody says something, reminds you of something, and you implement the program, and then you get some sort of payoff, and that is done without your conscious awareness or making any decisions. And if and it feels, like my clients say, like cheating. And the whole difference between how I help my clients to get into the fitter shape of their life when they were struggling with that for decades before, and they would go to this like intense sprints of doing, I don't know, some 75 heart or some other challenge, some diet challenge, and then they would something would happen, and they would get more stressed, more overwhelmed, busy, and uh or just tired, and they would stop it right and never to get back to it. Whereas habits, when you build them the right way, again, it's something that you do without even thinking about that, and it feels really easy and does not require any your of your conscious effort, and it feels again like cheating. And therefore, a lot of my clients would say, I feel like I'm living my life exactly as I would live my life, and I also do the things that I need to do to get the results that I want. And discipline is not a word ever that they use. But in order to build a habit, you can't build a lot of habits all at the same time. Unless you decide to only focus on building habits and you eliminate your work, your life, and you have no commitments, maybe then you can build a few habits at a time. Or if those habits are more like one habit, like a sandwich of habits stacked on top of each other, then you can build several habits in those conditions. But yeah, if you if those habits are still quite hard, quite different from what you're used to doing, and they require a lot of change on your part, in your environment, and just a lot of still organizing and thinking, you still won't be able to build them. Or if they don't fit in the real in the reality, in the context of your life, as soon as your motivation goes out of the window or something else becomes a priority, again it becomes unsustainable because it becomes too hard. So the first thing, how I help my clients to get into the fittest self with that's mentally, emotionally improving relationship, or literally fitness, or going to bed on time, or stopping drinking, or studied learning, or stopping scrolling, like how I help my clients with all of these behaviors that's supposed to be a thing that the discipline is needed for. We build habits, and we build habits the right way. And the right way means making sure that the kind of habit that we build actually fits into the life that you have, not the ideal life. The we build the habits in the way that survive your worst day, not just your best case scenario kind of day. And we build habits one at a time, and we follow habit recipe that is back by science. This is how our brain tends to automate things and make them into a habit, so then we can implement them without conscious thinking. Well, all of that to say, when we start working on something, A, I help my clients to start pacing themselves and focus on one habit at a time so they can then focus on other priorities like their work, their relationships, their families,

The One Habit Rule

SPEAKER_00 12:09

etc., while again changing this other area, like for example, fitness. So we choose one habit because one habit is usually what you can focus some of your attention, organize yourself so then to make it automatic before building another habit. Now, before you build a habit, it lives in the area of your brain that still needed, that still needs to make decisions, that still needs some effort. You're kind of building a road for your neurons to travel along. So the action that you need to perform, let's say working out, um is as fast and effortless and decision-free as it possibly can be. But before that happens, you need repetitions. But in order to do repetitions, you need to make the process itself as decision and effort and discipline-free as possible. And you do that by creating, by making the habit easy. Let's say instead of if you want to start exercising consistently, you don't want to be driving to the gym for an hour and then being stuck in some place and have to figure out all this complex equipment and have to jump through so many hoops to just get the thing going. Now, the first thing you want to do is to create a habit of exercising daily in whichever the easiest way it is. So let's say you wake up at I don't know, six and you dedicate the next 30 minutes to your exercise in the easiest way you can possibly imagine. Maybe you put your shorts by the door with your shoes, and you have your t-shirt and you go for a run, or you go and do some jumping jacks, or what I usually give my clients who really don't have any exercise habit and didn't have it for quite a while. I just ask them to do 100, which is 20 squats, 20 push-ups, 20 jumping jacks, 20 burpes, 20 sit-ups. Right? That is the workout. 6 a.m. You do the workout, you're done for the day. And you do that for two weeks until that becomes like the thing that you do. Every morning at 6 a.m. for 30 minutes, you do your exercise. And we repeat it, we repeat it, we repeat it. So they wake up, they seize their shorts, they put the shorts on, they put the shoes on, they exercise, they make themselves feel good by like whoo high-fiving themselves and rewarding yourself for creating positive emotion around what you're trying to do often and consistently is very important because the habit is a function of emotion, not a function of just repetition. The higher the more positive emotion you manufacture, you engineer, you make yourself feel, the faster you're gonna wire the habit. That's why drugs are so addictive, because they give you such a huge dopamine spike, which is a positive emotion, a reward for accomplishing certain things. So that's why again drugs are so addiction, like one and done, and you are addicted. Now, exercise is not like that, but it does produce dopamine. And if at the end you make yourself feel proud, you put some, you check some box so you even more acknowledge the getting things done, the progress of the habit. And then you repeat it, repeat it, repeat it. Uh, two weeks for such a habit is a good way to wire initial habit. Now, habits they say are formed somewhere between 18 to 254 days, and I think it depends on how fast you automate it by making it as repeatable, as simple, as easy as possible, and the intensity of positive emotion you make yourself feel. Like the more positive emotion you create around that thing. I believe personally, the faster you're gonna wire it, and the easier you make it to start it to do it, that also contributes to that. So we built one habit, and then let's say you now want to start working on your nutrition, and that's when you would start working on another habit, not like I'm gonna change my breakfast, lunch, and dinner all at the same time. No, you're gonna take one action. Like I'm gonna eat three eggs for my breakfast to add protein, nutrients, and maybe I'm gonna stack with protein shake, right? So my protein is on point every single morning because that is great for satiety, great, great for focus, great for not having cravings uh later during the day, great for maintaining stable energy and mood throughout the day, which are all important for improving all kinds of habits, right? Then you okay, I'm gonna eat those boiled eggs and I'm gonna pre-boil them for the whole week, and I'm gonna prepare my shake for the whole week. So the whole thing is super, super easy. And you do it every morning, right after you exercise, one and done, and you stack habits and you make yourself feel amazing, high-five yourself again. And that is the second habit that you're gonna be working for another couple of weeks. And habit by habit, you develop this new routine, new different rituals in your day. And the more repeatable you make them, the less they're gonna feel like work, and the more and the less they feel like work, the less discipline is needed, and the less discipline is needed, the less effort is needed, the higher there is a chance that you're gonna do it for your whole

Keep The Routine On Bad Days

SPEAKER_00 17:56

life. A friend of mine, we were driving from the gym and he said something along the lines that when he gets injured and he noticed it with a few people, that people just stop exercising at all. Like they they didn't move much, they don't walk much, they just, you know, I don't know, sit at the at their computer, if they have a sedentary job, they drive where they need to drive, and they do basically like zero exercise. And uh the reason why I wanted to tell you that is because for most of the habits, it is very important to continue the routine, even though sometimes you won't be able to do everything that you needed to do in the original habit. Like what I mean by that is if I don't have the opportunity to go to the gym in the morning, I go for a walk, right? And I can walk in almost any condition, even when I'm sick, I still go and can go for a very short walk, and so my routine still happens. I can still, I don't know, do yoga or some type of movement in the morning. So routine is there still, and it becomes context independent, and I made decisions in advance, so when I can't do X, I'm gonna do Y. When I can't do Y, I'm gonna do Z. But I still keep the exercise habit going. The same with nutrition. If I can't get certain, I don't know, protein or vegetable or something else, I grab whatever is the closest thing. Because of my education, I know that how to substitute foods, for example, really well. And that's what I also teach my clients. Like if you can't get, I don't know, your fish, you're gonna get whatever looks like meat, fish, chicken, like protein. If you can't get your broccoli, you're gonna get whatever else looks like vegetables, right? So we learn all these things how to substitute foods, so you get to eat either a healthy diet or you get to exercise no matter in what condition you are, whether you're injured or not. So you get to repeat the habit. And the more you again repeat the habit, the less discipline you need, and the less discipline than you need, the longer you're gonna maintain that habit. Even when you're tired, when you travel, when you don't have time, we're super busy. Your brain will almost demand you to do the habit. That's again how my clients feel. And my clients are super busy, they all they have like zero time for things they don't plan, they don't have time to sit on the couch, do nothing, they just do go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, right, because they love living their life to the fullest, and that's the only kind of client I I work with. And in that condition, we still build new habits that they need to create a different state of health, of mental health, or they need to prioritize their work differently or relationships. So maybe they now want to have more hobbies or have more fun, but still want to maintain you know their performance at work, etc. The point is, I help my clients to build the right kind of routines in a smarter way, so their life feels like cheating and they still achieve the results because this is the only way that is sustainable, not just for a year or a couple of years that we are together, but for their entire life. So it's a combination of understanding things better, but then also getting really, really good at building habits, not through willpower and discipline, but by creating the environment, the reinforcement loops, the scaling up, scale down routines, understanding how habits work in your brain. So then again, those are like automatic programs. Push a button, implement, and get on with your day. And the reason, guys, why um it's also so important to understand the how you can achieve.

Big Goals Are Built From Habits

SPEAKER_00 22:00

Results without discipline is because most of long-term, most of the bigger goals or something that you want to achieve, you want to write a book, you want to build a multi-million dollar business, you want to develop really great relationships that also take time, you want to build great, really great fitness and health that might take us several years, right? Somebody wants to, let's say, lose 30 kilos and had those clients. It's a multi-year project. It's not like you're gonna do it in a even in a year, unless you really want to make yourself suffer, and that's the only thing you're gonna focus for the next year. But it's a multi-year project, so those projects will require a lot of things done consistently, whether you want to do it, whether you feel like doing it or not, just a lot, a lot of habits. I always say that everything you want in life long term is on the other side of habits because everything you want in life sustainably and long term depends on you doing something consistently day in, day out. It's like brushing your teeth. You don't choose to brush your teeth every day. You want to have good teeth for the rest of your life, you brush it twice a day for the rest of your life. I also teach my clients to take the right kind of supplements. I I explain the science, etc. And they're like, so do I now take my multivitamin till the rest of my life? I'm like, do you want to feel good till the rest of your life? The science says that people who take that multivitamin feel better. Like, do you want this till the rest of your life? Do you want your healthy teeth till the rest of your life? Do you want to stay fit till the rest of your life? Do you want to have great relationships till the rest of your life? Yes, you kind of have to take it daily, to do it daily. And that is all about learning how to build habits, how to remove unwanted habits, and that's all there is to it. Yes, you gotta know like what what habit exactly you need. Like, for example, if you want to build a business, there are multiple of the things you can be doing, you can't do them all at the same time. So the the first thing is to figure out, and that's where coaching also is super helpful because coach will show you like here's the thing that is missing that you need to implement first in order to get to the next stage. So then, through again a combination of different habits and actions done consistently, you actually get to reach your goal. And the good coach will progress you through all of these steps from habit number one to the habit number two to the habit number three to the habit number four. They will help you to build skills through those habits, and those skills, when done consistently, you're gonna create the result that you want. And usually the result that you want still requires some sort of habit and consistent actions in order to be maintained. So that is the process of coaching, of achieving goals, of achieving results, and that is the process that does not require discipline, it requires understanding what you want in life and what the price for that prize is. And the best hack I found to understand what you have to pay for the result that you want is to ask people who already got that and or coaches who helped other people to get what you want. Because sometimes people get something that you want, but they don't really understand the whole process that got them there, and that's what teachers and coaches do. Like, okay, this is the process. You you do this and you achieve result. And when your coach or teacher gave this result to someone else, there is a very high probability they they can teach you the same process. And if they did it with many people, there is even higher probability, and that's why people with more experience get to be paid a lot more because they have this guarantee hey, I helped that many people to do this thing. Most probably I can help you to get the same.

The Core Lesson And Share Request

SPEAKER_00 26:24

But in any case, the most important lesson of today's podcast, if you want to get, is discipline has nothing to do with maintaining long-term goal and well getting the goal and maintaining it. It has to do with your ability of a choosing the right action, b making the habit of it. Because just like with brushing your teeth, if you want to get your clean, healthy teeth and you want to maintain them, you kind of gotta do it daily. I hope, guys, you learned something on this podcast. I hope that it made you think differently about discipline. And if you're trying to get yourself more discipline, please do understand it is not the discipline you're looking for. You're looking for better systems to build the right kind of habits that will, on autopilot, give you, as a side effect, the result that you want. And if you're still trying to get discipline, I can tell you right away, you're gonna fail. Thank you guys for tuning in. Thank you for listening. Please do share this podcast episode with at least one other person who you think will benefit from this podcast. This podcast is spread by people like yourself who would like other people to thrive and do better. We share this podcast. We are in 11,000 cities plus around the world on four four or five continents. I think it was five. So please do help this podcast to reach more ears eager to improve, learn, and get better. And till next time, keep growing.