Doepker - The healthy habit revolution : create better habits in 5 minutes a day

Do you want to know

• How you can permanently improve your habits in all areas of life in only five minutes a day without ever feeling overwhelmed?

• What perspective makes it impossible to develop lasting habits unless its changed first ?

• How to develop too-easy-to-fail habits that guarantee success every day?

• What force is stronger than willpower?

• How the wrong type of reward can actually sap your motivation?

• Why you need to both simplify and complicate things to be successful?

• What sports fans can teach you about creating better habits?

Before I go any further, you may be wondering who I am and what makes me qualified to teach this stuff. While Im currently a bestselling author, fitness coach, and trainer to entrepreneurs, I didnt start out this way.

My journey began when I was 17 years old. I was eating fast food every single night, never exercised, was terribly unhealthy, and no one could have paid me to change. Then, I discovered a few insights which youll learn later, that allowed me to do a complete 180, get myself into great shape, and most importantly, reprogram my habits so I maintained a fit body for 11 years straight without requiring any great feats of willpower on my part.

After transforming my fitness habits, however, I started to notice just how difficult it was to get those same results in other areas of my life. Have you ever had the experience of having it totally together in one area of your life while other things seem to be falling apart? While my body was great, others habits relating to my finances, social life, and overall happiness needed a lot of work.

I would wonder, why was I able to change some habits and not others? I was also extremely disappointed when, after sharing great fitness tips with my friends who asked for help, most of them wouldnt change a single thing they were doing. Imagine how frustrating it is to offer the best advice in the world only to have it fall on deaf ears. I wanted to help those I cared about, but obviously I was missing something.

Then I got curious. I wasnt forced to change my fitness habits because I hit rock bottom. Rather, I changed my habits almost overnight by what seemed to be a simple conscious choice to better my life. Yet when I looked around, I saw so many people who were making grand New Years resolutions and setting big goals, but who struggled to make lasting change. Some friends and family members seemed desperate to change things, and yet no amount of motivation they had ever lasted long enough for them to make any type of lasting change.

Was I able to change some of my habits because I was more disciplined and stronger willed, or did I just do something a little differently than most people? I realized that if it was my strategy rather than my personality that was responsible for my success, I could show people how to change their long-standing habits without having to wait until things got so bad that they were forced to change. I could also apply the strategies to other key areas of my life that I wanted to improve.

This led me to start studying everything I could about psychology, motivation, and personal development to get to the bottom of why we do what we do. I wanted to know how you can reprogram your brain for more creativity, drive, and success in almost any area of life. It turns out, there were a few simple but profound reasons why some people change and others dont. I saw that there is a blueprint for human behavior that, once understood, allows you to create dramatic transformations in your habits. With this information, I learned how to hack the brain so to speak. It turns out, youre not doomed to be a victim of your current habits, traits, and personality. Research has shown that we are far more flexible and adaptable than previously thought. Pretty sweet huh?

Once I saw the dramatic results in my own life by applying what I had learned, I decided to pass that information on to others so they could achieve the same benefits without having to spend years researching this information.

Many of the strategies and insights that Im sharing in this book are from people much smarter than me who have studied habits and human behavior extensively. What I did was distill down their knowledge to make it easy for me to remember and, most importantly, apply. Now Im sharing that simplified knowledge with you so you can upgrade your own habits the smart way which youll learn doesnt require superhuman willpower or hyped-up motivation.

While youll see plenty of personal examples from my life, realize that the underlying principles Im applying arent just something I made up. Instead, the lessons and insights shared here come from my research into the psychology of habit development. What Ive done is simplify the concepts into actionable steps you can take. There are recommended resources at the end of this book for those who also want an objective, scientific explanation behind many of these concepts as well as reading about other peoples experiences applying these techniques.

This book is primarily about subtraction rather than addition. By subtracting out all the fluff and giving you just a single thing or two to focus on each day, youll naturally move forward to make huge breakthroughs almost effortlessly.

While I may be adding some new ideas and concepts to your knowledge, I bet there will be a lot of things in this book that fall under the common sense category. So why is this book so critically important if you want to change your habits? What Ive found most people need to change isnt more information on how to change. If anything, people are often overwhelmed with too much information and that keeps them from progressing. What you need instead is a step-by-step blueprint that takes all the thought out of it. Changing habits can be hard enough as it is. Wouldnt you prefer something that makes the entire process a no-brainer?

Its also important to understand there are a few things about human behavior and habit development that are completely counterintuitive, or at the very least, rarely talked about. For instance, theres a single trait that, if you dont cultivate it, will make long-term habit change virtually impossible. My goal with writing this book is to fill in the gaps many other people leave out.

Its also essential to learn the aspects of changing your habits as part of a holistic system. While you can get great results with some isolated tactics here and there, this book is about creating something greater than the sum of its parts. Learning something like the micro-habits approach is great, but its not enough unless you combine it with other crucial principles. As youll discover when you get to the end of the book, Ive also planted a few hidden lessons that can dramatically increase your happiness and success far beyond simply developing better habits.