Hacking Your Habits: 3 Questions for Fitness Coach Chrissy Heyne

My friend and habit guru Chrissy Heyne is running a virtual quarantine habit challenge- it starts June 1 and will definitely provide lots of info, accountability, and fun. Re-sharing our interview from January 2020 originally published on Medium- still relevant now (maybe more so!). Find Chrissy on Instagram to join her challenge- Chrissy_heyne.

It’s New Year’s resolution time and I, like millions of others, want to be better in 2020. I talked with my friend Chrissy Heyne to get her perspective on building habits that work for you- in health and at work.

How did you first get interested in health and habits?
When I moved to Michigan, I was working full-time from home and I didn’t know anyone in town. I needed a reason to leave the house, and a community, and so I started going to a little gym studio around the corner from my house. I got in a routine of going at the same time every day, which built a community and built a great set of habits for me. It made such a difference in my overall life and I slowly became more passionate about helping others — especially moms and working women. I realized pretty quickly that the best way to help as many people as possible was through online “challenge” groups. I read Gretchen Rubin’s book, “Better Than Before” and became really obsessed with how our individual personalities orient us to habits. My challenges are less about telling you *which* habits to build (I actually don’t do that — I play a role in helping you get a sense of what might matter to you for the 21 days) and *more* about giving you tools, resources, and tips to better understand yourself so that you can build the habits you’re focused on.

It’s January now. How do you think about New Year’s Resolutions?

If I use Gretchen Rubin’s language, I’m a Questioner. When it comes to inner or outer expectations (i.e. habits), if I don’t fully get why it matters or genuinely care about it, I just don’t stick with it. Once I do get the rationale and believe the habit is important for me, I’m an Upholder — meaning, I just meet the expectation or habit. When it comes to resolutions, I personally don’t do well with them because I’m immediately overwhelmed by a “new” large task and also just generally not invested in the idea of a resolution overall. Instead, I tend to step back and take stock of my life overall and think about where I’m trying to go this year and what I might need to start doing to move in that direction. For example, I’ve been wanting to eat less meat for years now. The idea of becoming vegetarian just paralyzed me so I never made any traction on eating less meat because it did not seem feasible. Instead, in the last month or so, I’ve decided I’m going to go “mostly meatless” and only eat meat when I really want it and it’s high quality. That works for ME. So, that’s what I think about New Year’s Resolutions for myself — but what I think in general is do what works for YOU. You know that better than anyone. If you’re forcing yourself to do things that you either don’t want to do or don’t know how to do, you’re stuck in a perpetual state of not changing or getting to where you’re trying to go. And if you don’t yet know yourself well enough to think about how YOU best build habits, join my groups!

My executive coaching work is focused on helping people work better and feel better, and habits and routines are such an important part of that. What have you learned about habits that applies to a professional setting?

The most important thing I’ve learned in my own life and through my coaching is that for most of the things you want to change, the thing that’s holding you back is your own ability to say yes or no. With fitness habits, it’s common for people to say they don’t have time to work out, and that’s usually just not true for most people. Of course, that’s not the case for everyone, especially people with less flexibility and privilege… but many of us are choosing to chill on the couch after work and then say we don’t have time to go to the gym. And that’s not a judgement! That’s just a choice you’re making and you should own that it’s the reason you’re not doing a different thing (whether it’s reading, working out, etc.) You are making a choice and you should be aware of that.

With work, it’s the same thing. If you’re finding yourself working around the clock, getting your computer back out at night, taking on too much, the barrier to fixing that problem in most cases is you. As a manager, there have been times when I’ve very directly told my direct reports to work less, and they can’t do it even when their boss is telling them to! At work, you have to remember you can still be in control and you are making choices. I see people take on things by rationalizing, “But if I don’t do “x”, I’ll feel guilty.” OK — then let’s work on THAT rather than saying yes over and over simply because you would feel “guilty” if you didn’t.

What are the rules and habits that govern your workday? How do you decide what you can take on? I try to notice when I’m stuck in negative self-talk, like “I’m not enough” or “I’m not being helpful enough to others,” and coach myself out of it. It’s really an orientation to life: life either happens TO me or BY me. That’s from 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership. What do I want? Am I making a set of decisions that are in line with the change I want to see? We have the power to change ourselves if we get out of our own way.