Ep #155: The 3 Components of Building Consistency with Gregg Clunis

Welcome to The Not Your Average Runner Podcast. If you’re a woman who has never felt athletic but you still dream about becoming a runner, you are in the right place. I’m Jill Angie, a certified running and life coach and I teach women how to start running, feel confident, and change their lives, and now I want to help you.

Jill: Hey rebels. So I have a very special guest this week to interview and have him share his deep wisdom on all things consistency and goal setting and change and just all the stuff that we talk about right here on this show. His name is Gregg Clunis. Wait, did I just say your name correctly?

Gregg: Yeah, you did.

Jill: Okay, good. He is the host of the Tiny Leaps, Big Changes podcast. He is a new runner of course, which is amazing. He’s the author of the book by the same name, Tiny Leaps, Big Changes, and he also has an amazing Instagram. Gregg, what is your Instagram?

Gregg: So the Instagram is @tinyleaps.

Jill: Tiny leaps. I love this. And he recently started a course called The Consistency Code, which we’re going to talk about later on. But right now, I just have to tell you guys, I saw Gregg speak in 2018 in Philadelphia at the Podcast Movement Conference.

See, I’m so nervous talking to you. I can barely get the words out. And I was just blown away by all the amazing content and concepts that he had to share, so I’m super excited to have him on the podcast today. So with all of that said, Gregg, welcome.

Gregg: Jill, thank you so much for having me. It’s honestly a pleasure to be here.

Jill: Yeah, thank you so much. It’s my pleasure to interview you. And I guess before – I’ve got a million questions to ask, but what I’d love to start with is to have you maybe introduce yourself and share parts of your story that you think are relevant or whatever you would like to say as a welcome to everyone.

Gregg: So I host a podcast called Tiny Leaps, Big Changes, and I started it about five years ago. So this coming January will be five years. The goal was quite honestly I was just angry at personal development as a practice because it’s something that’s very near and dear to my heart. I got into it when I was 13. My brother introduced me to it and it really, at that early age, it defined who I became.

As I was going through teenage years, I was reading books, as I was going through college, I was reading books, watching videos, listening to the motivational messages and stuff, and really internalizing a lot of this stuff. So it’s an area that is very near and dear to my heart and a few years ago, I realized that with the rise of Instagram and sort of this drive for everyone to become an influencer, it started being used more as a here’s a piece of content that’s a cute quote, but isn’t really that practical, it isn’t really that helpful to anybody.

Like yeah, I can post a card saying hey, start your mornings right and have a six-hour morning routine, but the average person who is working one job or maybe even more than one job, really trying to make ends meet, they’re not able to do that. So how is that relevant? How is that helpful?

So I really wanted to start something that took a lot of the messages that we know work, that we know can be helpful, and help people apply it to their situation in their life, wherever they’re starting. And that’s been my mission for the last five years really.

So that’s where everything sort of started for me. That ended up turning into the book, which is completely original. It’s not podcast episodes transcribed. I wanted to write something from scratch because it had always been my dream to have my own book, and here was this opportunity.

So I put that book out and really, it helped me solidify a lot of what the podcast had been up to that point, the idea that maybe I didn’t fully grasp yet but I was putting out, the book helped me solidify and then since then, I’ve been able to further solidify a lot of them, so I’m excited to really dive into some of those.

Jill: I am too. For anybody listening, just go get Gregg’s book because it’s really, really good. It’s really awesome. And I took a million notes as I was reading it originally and then I just re-read it in preparation for today’s show and found even more stuff in it that I thought was amazing. So I mean, I guess I’d like to start though with what are tiny leaps?

Gregg: Yeah, so a tiny leap in my opinion is your next step, whatever that is. And I chose that name very specifically because there is this notion in our day-to-day lives, in our personal growth journeys that if something is so small of a step that it doesn’t feel worth it. We just don’t bother doing it.

So the example I always give is let’s say you want to build the habit of flossing. This is a pretty common thing. The advice that’s given a lot is well, floss one tooth. But the problem is when you do that, you end up feeling stupid. You end up feeling like what’s the point of doing this? This is a waste of my time, I don’t have the time tonight or I don’t have the energy or I’m too tired, so I’m just not going to floss at all.

But the truth is flossing that one tooth, doing that one tiny thing, whatever that is in whatever habit or goal that you’re trying to build, that helps you develop a few things that is what leads to consistency over time. The number one thing in my opinion is the identity.

So I know a lot of your listeners are runners, I’m a recent runner myself. I grew up hating running up until March of this year. No, May of this year. I hated running. Absolutely despised it. I was always the kid in high school that had the slowest mile time. It was always painful. I never recognized that my form was bad or my breathing wasn’t – I wasn’t controlling it. I didn’t take the time to learn those things because I just hated this and all of the feelings that came with it.

So I never had that identity. What helped me get there was going out for a run, regardless of the distance, regardless of the speed. It wasn’t about did I do a mile today? It wasn’t about did I do more than I did yesterday? It was did I run or not. If I ran and just went down the block, that was valuable. That was helpful. That allowed me the next day to have a little tiny bit more of that identity of being a runner, which then made it more likely long-term that I would go for it.

Jill: This is just so well said. I love this. Because it’s something that I’m talking to my runners about all the time. They say, “Well, if I don’t go out for at least half an hour, what’s the point?” I’m like, just go for five minutes, check the box, and you’re keeping the habit even if you’re not necessarily moving your fitness forward, you’re moving your brain, your identity forward.

Gregg: Yeah. And what I always try to tell people is if you identify as a runner and then you have an injury, let’s say you break an ankle and hopefully no one listening does, but let’s pretend that imaginary Vanessa does. After her recovery period, she’s far more likely to go for a run than the person who started running but never developed the identity, simply because she identifies as a runner. She’s the type of person who runs.

So when she’s able to, she’s going to go for a run. She’s going to feel that craving feeling for it. The person who started and maybe is doing it as a workout but doesn’t really like it that much, doesn’t have the identity, didn’t stick with it long enough who then breaks an ankle, after their recovery, they’re starting over from scratch. They don’t have that identity, so it’s not natural for them to go out and do this thing.

Jill: Yeah, that’s really well said too because as runners, we get injured. It’s kind of a thing that happens. And sometimes it is an acute injury like breaking an ankle, sometimes it’s an overuse injury. But as a runner, you’re almost always going to face at least some point in your life when you’re taking time off, even if it’s just like, oh, I just ran my first marathon and I’m taking a month off to rest, no matter what it is.

But then there’s that belief like if I take too much time off, I’ll never get back to it. But what you’re saying is if you have a strong identity as a runner, it doesn’t really matter if you take time off because that’s just who you are and it’ll naturally become – at least be easier to recreate the routine.

Aside from the tiny leaps of doing something daily every day to reinforce that, what are some of the other aspect of identity that you think are important to create?

Gregg: I think what’s helpful is looking at it as – so let’s say the goal is you want to be more consistent in your running. Let’s look at what leads to consistency. So there is of course, having the identity of being a runner. That’s going to make it far easier for you to take the action.

But you don’t develop identity without doing the thing. You can’t identify as a runner just because you think about running. You have to actually run for a long enough period of time. So how do we get – while you’re developing that identity, how do we get you to actually do the thing consistently?

Well, there’s a couple of things that help and I’ve found that there’s three main pieces. There is accountability, so whether that’s accountability to yourself, which can be done in the form of journaling, can be done purely in the form of reflection, vision boards, whatever method you ascribe to or subscribe to.

Or accountability from somebody else, accountability to a group. Like I know you have Jill, accountability to any number of things. But having something other than just your inner thoughts holding you to, hey, I said I’m going to do this is helpful. And the more versions of accountability you can stack together.

So for example, if you are journaling that hey, tomorrow I’m going to run X, Y, Z, and you’re also telling your partner and you’re also mentioning it on a live call in your group, those three levels can stack on top of each other to increase the pressure that you’re more likely to follow through on.

So accountability, massive piece of it. Then we have self-empathy. And self-empathy in my opinion is the part that we’re missing the most when it comes to goal setting in any area of our lives because we take a really interesting approach to goals where we set the goal and then we look at our lives to figure out where that goal fits in, when in actuality, we need to look at our lives and set the goal based on that context.

So if you are a 23-year-old recent college grad with no kids, you’ve got a decent job, you’re living by yourself or maybe living with a partner, it’s far easier for you to go out for a run every day or every other day or whatever your frequency is than it would be for someone who has three young children at home.

That’s a different lifestyle. Now, neither is necessarily good or bad, but there are constraints attached to your life and you need to be aware and consider those constraints, and that’s what I mean when I say self-empathy is recognizing you’re a human being. This idea that we set the goal so we just have to execute because we said we would is just straight nonsense and it’s adding so much pressure that you end up doing nothing. You end up avoiding setting goals altogether.

If we can treat our goal setting with this understanding that our life is what it is and we can find ways to work around that, but we have to first understand what those constraints are, if we can set our goals from that place, we give ourselves the space that we need to fail sometimes. We give ourselves the space that we need to not go for a run. We give ourselves the space that we need to go for a run.

And all of a sudden, the entire thing feels a lot less heavy and a lot less of this chore that I have to show up for every day because my coach is going to get mad at me. And then the final big piece that I’ve found with consistency is awareness.

So how top of mind is this thing for you? A lot of times, when you don’t have the identity built already, the reason you don’t follow through on your actions is simply because life got in the way. Things popped up, you were on your way home from work, you had planned to get home, get changed, and go out for your run.

But then on your drive home, the babysitter calls and says that your son had an accident or something. That’s going to shift your plans. That’s going to shift your life. If you keep that goal top of mind as you navigate whatever that shift is, you’re still potentially going to get to it once you’ve dealt with it.

But if you don’t actively have a system for keeping that goal top of mind, it’s going to get shoved to the back because it’s not important compared to all the other things you have to deal with right now. And this is why we forget things.

So what I’ve found to be helpful here, my personal awareness tool, well, there’s two. So the first is inside of a platform that I’m developing for Tiny Leaps as one of our first products. I’ve built a system called AVA, which is the automated virtual accountability system.

And the purpose of it is you go through, you set your goals, you set what your task is, and you can set a follow-up frequency. That frequency sends you a text message on a daily basis, on a three-day basis, or on a weekly basis that just helps you keep this task top of mind.

So it’s not so much this high pressure, hey, you said you were going to do this, do it now. It’s more so life is going to happen and we need to let that space exist for life to happen, but we have a set system in place so that we’re always being reminded of what we said we wanted to do. Because if we can keep it top of mind, we’re far more likely to take action.

And then the other thing that I personally use is as simple as sticky notes. I know the four areas in my house that my eyes land on the most every day. My bathroom mirror, my bed frame as I’m walking up to the bed, my refrigerator door, and my computer screen.

So on those four areas that my eyes land on every single day, I have a sticky note reminding me of what my current goal is. And its only purpose is to exist. It doesn’t need to add any pressure, it doesn’t need to make me feel like it’s there, I have to do it. It’s purely to keep it top of mind because if it’s top of mind, I’m more likely to do it.

So those are the three big things in my opinion that help drive behavior before identity gets developed is accountability systems, the approach that we take with our goal setting that considers our life, considers context and gives ourselves room that is self-empathy, and the awareness piece. Can we keep this task and this goal top of mind so that when life inevitably happens, we’re able to come back to it.

Jill: I love that. And that keeping it top of mind is a piece that – that’s not something I’ve ever really engaged in before. I mean, I’ll journal about it once a day if I’m working on a goal, but I could think of a million things that I’ve thought, oh yeah, I totally want to do that, and then – perfect example.

So I decided that I wanted to get really into – you’re going to laugh – needle point, because I saw all these cute kits on Etsy with swear words that were needle pointed. And I thought, oh my god, that’s the most fun thing ever. So I ordered a bunch of kits and I tried them out, and then I put them in the closet when I was cleaning up one day and a month went by and I thought, holy crap, I just forgot all about this because I didn’t keep it top of mind.

It just wasn’t in my visual and I didn’t have an identity yet as a needle pointer. And I’m like, oh, maybe I shouldn’t have cleaned that up. Maybe I should have just put a note saying hey, 10 minutes, spend 10 minutes a day doing this or something, rather than…

Gregg: And here’s the thing. This can get really difficult because we also go blind to things. We can add the sticky notes but eventually, it’s just going to be there and we’re now used to it, so it’s not really keeping it top of mind anymore. That’s why having more dynamic systems like having an email sent to you, having a text message, this is something I’m building as part of my product, but you could set that up for yourself.

You could have a partner do that for you. Getting something that alerts you that is far more dynamic than just the equivalent of a banner ad on the side of your screen allows it to stay top of mind longer term. The sticky note is helpful for a period of time and then one strategy is just move the side of the screen that it’s on, move the side of the fridge that it’s on so it’s in a different place. It’s now a different environment and you can react to it similarly, as opposed to just getting blind to it.

Jill: I love that so much. Because I’m really big on scheduling things. So if I’m going to go for a run, it’s in my calendar, 7am, Tuesday morning, go for a run. But then the little things like the new habits that I’m trying to create, it doesn’t occur to me to do that. And it doesn’t occur to me to do – I think I’ve done Post-It notes a couple times, and then yeah, it does go blind.

So I love the idea of scheduling an email to be like, hey, remember you said you were going to do this. This is not just like, you should do this, but hey, this is a thing you said you wanted to do. Here’s a reminder that you do want to do it, rather than – because sometimes we’re just like, for me, I’ll say I want to do all these things and then I start to feel overwhelmed because I’m thinking, look, I’ve just set myself up for failure.

And then I say, fuck it, I just give everything up. I don’t do any of it. So where is the sweet spot regarding that with like, reminding yourself too much and just getting pissed off at yourself versus – and does that fall into the category of self-empathy?

Gregg: It does. And that’s exactly what I was about to say is it comes down to both the in the process that we’re following, as well as in our overall philosophy of how change and personal growth, how we think about that. In the process, we have to build empathy and allow ourselves that space for life to happen.

But in the actual philosophy of how we think about change and habits, it can’t be about the short-term. It has to be long-term lifestyle change. And I know this is true for running, this is true for so many goals. But when we’re really looking at creating change in our lives, we have to recognize that if we don’t take a task today, or if we don’t take a task for the next week, whatever it is, maybe it’s something we said we were going to do, it’s something that feels important.

If we don’t take action in the next week, that has to be okay because our goal isn’t to do something in the next week. Our actual goal is for the next 10, 50, 100 years, however long we’re alive, to have this life that is different based on these actions that I’m taking. That’s our actual goal.

Our goal isn’t I want to go for a run today. Our goal is I want to be a runner. I want to live a life that feels enriching and has that as a major part of it. So remember what your actual goal is and stop getting tied up in well, I screwed it up today or I got too busy or well, I already set myself up for failure so I guess I’m just going to cancel that goal. It doesn’t matter over the scale of the next 50 years. What is one day in a lifetime of 50 to 100 years that you’re trying to build something in for?

Jill: And something you said just really resonated with me because I think a lot of times we believe that our goal is to strive to be perfect. And I’m like, no. I don’t think that’s ever – when you’re on your deathbed, do you want to be like, oh, I’m so glad I finally achieved perfection, or do you want to say wow, I just really went for it and I had all these experiences and I just lived my life deeply, was willing to fail and break shit and do all the things in pursuit of growth and evolution, but not necessarily perfection?

Gregg: Yeah. And that’s why I pretty consistently on my show say progress over perfection. Progress needs to become the actual target. Not this idealized concept that we have of what our life should look like if we do this thing. And quite frankly, I had a run yesterday. I did not want to go for it. It was not a great day, didn’t feel great at the end.

And I typically run in the afternoons or evenings, right before dinner. And went out for the run, decided you know what, I’m going to take it slow. Absolutely loved it. It was a phenomenal run, but if I was worried about my time, if I was worried about how far I went, I would have walked away from that run feeling like I didn’t do enough.

So by not putting that pressure on myself and giving myself the space to recognize I’m not in a place emotionally right now to push myself that far, so let me just do this as a thing that I enjoy that allows me to get outside, allows me to connect with my body, all of a sudden what would have been considered a “failure” because I didn’t hit my targets, now that’s a success because I feel great afterwards. It’s just how you think about it and what you allow yourself to do.

Jill: I absolutely love that so much. There’s a quote from your book, there’s a section, the conclusion of your book really hit me hard. And there’s a quote that I kind of wanted to share and I thought maybe you might be willing to talk about it a little bit. So at the very end of the book, you’re talking about the end of your father’s life.

Gregg: Spoiler alert.

Jill: And it was really powerful. And there was two passages, so I’m just going to read the passages, but then I would just love to hear your deeper thoughts on the concepts. So you said, “We stress over conversations we’ve had, who likes us and who doesn’t, what we’ll have for dinner and a whole slew of other things that only matter in a low stakes environment.”

And then a few paragraphs later, you say, “In our minds, life is not urgent. It’s something we have always had and we can’t imagine a moment in which we don’t have it any longer.” I legit got very teary when I was reading that because it made sense to me and I thought of all the years of my life that I’ve spent agonizing over someone’s opinion or the size of my butt.

Stuff that’s so irrelevant. And I just kind of always thought like, oh, I’ve just got all the time in the world to fix all these things that I perceived as problems. I just want to turn it over to you. Can you say more about those particular passages? Because I felt like you just sort of encapsulated just sort of why we suffer so much as humans, or at least in this current society.

Gregg: Yeah, and I’m so glad that that piece resonated with you because – so to give listeners some context, so throughout my book, I talk a lot about how being an immigrant to the US, I was born in Jamaica, came here when I was eight years old, how being an immigrant, having that sort of traditional immigrant story of working hard, moving up, but not directly facing it because I was a child.

Sort of being in this backseat position, watching my parents’ experiences and the choices they made, how that really drove so much of my understandings of personal development and how we can apply things to our lives. And the end of the book sort of shares that during the process of writing that book, my father actually passed away as a result of complications due to lung cancer treatment.

And that passage and that entire section, I used to kind of joke that he kind of gave me the end to my book. My mom was proud of me, I knew that. They were never the parents who said like, oh, I’m so proud of you. But he, I knew was proud because every time I saw him for the few months prior to his death, he would ask me how writing my book was going.

He was constantly asking about it. And up until the moment that he died, I hadn’t made that much progress. Actually, the entirety of the book, I would say 85%, 90% of it was written in the few months after he passed away. And once he passed away, it really started to make me look at how much of his life had changed during his treatment and how much he as a person had changed during his treatment.

And I grew up with a very stubborn father. He was afraid of – not afraid necessarily, but he just refused to try anything new. He refused to really break any of the patterns that he had had his entire life. And after getting diagnosed, after being told that he was probably going to die, they gave him one tiny sliver of an option that wasn’t even presented as an option, it was just hey, you should really do this, to quit smoking, which he had done since the age of 14 or something insane like that.

To quit smoking, quit drinking, really clean up his diet. Really just told him this isn’t even likely to really change the outcome, but you should try it. And when I tell you a man who had smoked cigarettes from the age of 13, had tried to quit multiple times throughout my life.

We used to get into a lot of fights because when I was a kid, I used to hide his cigarettes. It was always back of my head that this was not a good thing. He quit smoking in a period of four weeks completely. Never had a cigarette again for the rest of his life.

And he’d always failed up to that point. He’d always been unable to do it. So it started me raising this question, why did it work this time? Why is it that as soon as his life was on the line, all of a sudden change – I don’t want to say it was easy, but it was all of a sudden possible, all of a sudden within reach for him, and why couldn’t be have done that 10 years prior? Why couldn’t he have done that five years prior? Why couldn’t he have done that a year prior?

Because if he had, he probably would still be alive. Most of his life he smoked, he did not have a single negative ailment from it, never developed a cough, never developed any of the side effects that come with cigarettes. It’s in the last year or two prior to his death that all of a sudden, a tumor decides to pop up.

So if he had just been able to find that same strength a tiny bit earlier, he would have gotten away with it. And so it really started raising this question to me because this isn’t the only story of that. This happens all the time. People get diagnosed with things and all of a sudden, everything about their life changes. Who they’ve been as a person for their entire life completely shifts overnight because it’s presented as their only option if they want to cling to whatever this thing is, this life that we’re all going through.

So as I was thinking through this and writing the book, and really, I want to clear like, this is me theorizing. This isn’t based on anything. I’m no expert in behavioral psychology or anything like that. It’s purely based on my own experience and what I’ve read about all those experiences. But it seems like when you get that diagnosis, when something serious happens that takes you out of the game completely, where failure means game over, you’re done, that’s it, all of a sudden, things become high stakes.

And when you’re in a high stakes situation, and I remember reading through a lot of articles on professional poker players. When they’re in these high stakes situations, they have a lot of money on the line and failure means game over, a lot of times, that’s when they make the most drastic decisions, or seemingly drastic decisions.

That’s when they go for it the most. Whereas when people are playing to protect their hand, to protect where they are, they play is safe. And that just made so much sense about how we all live our lives. The things we worry about on a day-to-day basis are so unimportant, but it gives us that feeling of we’re protecting what we have.

Whereas the things that truly matter, the things that are the big massive changes that would allow us to actually live the lives that we want now, instead of waiting until the end of our lives to get there, that’s too risky. And because we’re not in a high stakes situation, we never take those risks. We play it safe. We hold onto what we have instead of going for what we could have.

The minute we get into that high stakes situation, it doesn’t matter anymore. The risks, I’m going to die anyway, so I may as well. And I don’t know the answer to how we tap into that prior to that moment…

Jill: That was going to be my next question.

Gregg: I really don’t. And I wish it was something that we could. But I think even just getting the understanding that this is how we’re playing our lives right now, life truly is at all moments high stakes. Think of the over 100,000 people who have died so far in the US alone from COVID. They did not know they were going to die this year. They never thought for a moment that they were going to die this year.

And they did because a pandemic came out of nowhere and just happened. And there are still people dying now and there are still people dying from other things. Life is always high stakes, but we are so used to it that we forget that and it’s almost because we’re scared to admit that that we never recognize how truly short everything is and how I could end this interview and go get hit by a car.

I could end this interview and have a random heart attack. Things just happen sometimes. So if you’re not able to truly grasp – if you’re really struggling to make changes, I think one thing that could help, and it’s not an easy place to get to, but if you can start to recognize how short this all is and how high stakes everything truly is, I think that change becomes easy to do. It’s just a question of how do you tap into that.

Jill: Yeah. And how do you tap into it without living in a state of panic.

Gregg: Exactly. Because we also can’t be in that place 24/7.

Jill: And because I think when you’re in that state of panic, you’re not effectively living your life either, so it is like, it’s kind of a sweet spot. But it’s like an interesting concept to explore because we do, we live our lives as if we’ve got forever. And we don’t.

Gregg: We really don’t. We have far less time – even if you live to the ripe old age of 112, that’s still such a short period of time when you really look at the grand scale of everything. You’re here for a very, very minor moment and it doesn’t matter what you do or how important you try to be. Give it 100 years, everyone’s going to forget about you.

So while you’re here, what can you do to make things better for yourself so you enjoy it more, make things better for the people around you so they can enjoy it more. That’s all we can affect.

Jill: I just have to say like, thank you for explaining the story behind that philosophy because it makes it – it’s easier to kind of grasp that life is a high stakes game when there’s a personal story that you’re like, oh, I get that. Because we’ve all lost somebody that we loved that we’re just like, crap, I really didn’t see that coming.

And I know, my siblings, my sister is about to turn 70 and I know I’m very guilty of thinking like, oh, she’s my sister, she’s going to be around forever, I have all the time in the world. And recognizing that well, maybe I shouldn’t just say I’ll text her to say hi tomorrow because life is urgent.

Reading this passage really changed my perspective on how I live my own life and how I want to show up for myself every day, and so I just want to thank you for that because it made a difference for me, and hopefully it’ll make a difference for everyone listening. And hopefully they’ll just go buy your fucking book. I should have warned you before we started. I swear a lot on this podcast.

Gregg: I don’t mind it.

Jill: They’re all used to it. So I guess I kind of want to wrap it up by just reiterating where can people find you, and I also want to hear about the course that you’re teaching called The Consistency Code because that just fascinates me, it sounds amazing.

Gregg: Okay, so a couple things here. If you want to listen to my show, you’re already listening to a podcast, the easiest thing in the world, just search Tiny Leaps, Big Changes. Give it a shot. There are 560-something episodes and they’re pretty varied as far as topics.

So I’m not even going to recommend try this episode or that. Pick whatever jumps out at you in this moment right now and try that episode. Once you’ve listened, I would love your feedback, whether good or bad. So find the podcast on Instagram, @tinyleaps. Shoot the page a message.

I respond to everybody. I’m the one who runs it so I’m always there having conversations, and that’s honestly some of my favorite things to do on a day-to-day basis. So find the podcast, shoot me a message, and I’d love to talk about the actual episode.

And the course is called The Consistency Code. So one of the things that over the last nearly five years of hosting this podcast, I’ve learned from listeners, from myself, from guests that I’ve interviewed, from the documents I’ve gone through and different research that I’ve done is that the number one reason people struggle to make changes is that they don’t do it for a long enough period of time.

It’s really easy to set a goal and start it, but most of us as we go through that, we’re always in this state of like, starting over. We set the goal, we do it for a month, life gets in the way, and then we have to start over.

So I created this course called The Consistency Code, which explores a lot of what we’ve discussed in this episode, where we talk about accountability, we talk about self-empathy, we talk about awareness, we talk about why smart goals often don’t work and a goal-setting framework I came up with called Leap Goals, that is to prioritize long-term lifestyle changes, empathy in our goal-setting process, what actions we can actually take, and process-driven activities.

So for example, going out for a run, even if it’s five minutes still counts as a win for the day because you did the task, as opposed to I need this specific outcome. I need to go for a mile or I need to go at a five-minute 20 pace because I’m an Olympic runner or something. So we go through all this stuff in the course and you can learn more about that at consistencycourse.com.

Jill: Love it. Alright, so we’re going to have links to all of this stuff in the show notes. This is episode 155 and I mean, can I just say, the whole concept of tiny leaps, when I first started this podcast, I was like, I’m just going to do three episodes. And then it’s like, I’m just going to do one more, I’m just going to do one more. And boom, 155. You’re at like, 500, 600 or something.

Gregg: I will say, there has never been anything in my life, outside of my relationship that I’ve stuck with as long and I truly did not intend for it to keep running this long. Similar to you, I wanted to do it purely out of anger, I wanted to put something out and I was working on 10 other things at the time. So whatever, this is just going to exist. And here I am nearly five years later and it’s amazing. So I completely get you on that.

Jill: So fun. Well, thank you so much Gregg for joining me today. It has been an absolute pleasure. This is my jam. I love talking about stuff like this, especially with people who’ve really mastered it and just created so much structure and framework around a thing that we all struggle with so much. So thank you so much for joining me today and I can’t wait to check out The Consistency Code.

Gregg: Thank you so much for having me.

Oh, and one last thing. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, you have to check out the Rebel Runner Roadmap. It’s a 30-day online program that will teach you exactly how to start running, stick with it, and become the runner you’ve always wanted to be. Head on over to rebelrunnerroadmap.com to join. I’d love to be a part of your journey.