How to Stick to a Routine from a Former Flaky Gym Friend

and health. I'm your host, Steph Pace, and I'm the woman behind Just Another Mummy blog and also the founder of Steph Pace Planners. But I can assure you this is not just another podcast online. I'm known for my organization tips and tricks and the occasional banter, but it definitely wasn't always this way. I used to be a hot mess and occasionally still am. And I'm here as your honest and real friend each week to show you

how I turn my life of chaos into clarity. Between the house, health, kids, work, and wanting to be the best version of yourself, it can be overwhelming, and I'm here to give you the tools and tips to stop you feeling like a slave to your daily time, asks, home life, and especially the expectations you have on yourself. Join me as I share my journey and insights into the art of balancing at all and speak to guests

who can help us all live a better life. Whether you're looking to streamline your daily routines, usial wellbeing, achieve your fitness goals, dive into personal development, or find inspiration to step up into the best version of yourself, We've got you. So are you ready to step up your game? Let's go. Hello guys, and welcome back to Stepping Up. This episode is going to be calling a fair few

people out, including myself. But this is a really important conversation because this is something that I feel I have battled with most of my life, and that is actually following through with the things that I tell myself I'm going to do, actually like sticking to routines you want

to start. Maybe it's like going for a walk, or you want to get into the gym, or it could be as simple as, okay, I want to keep more on top of my house cleaning, or you know those things that you're like, starting Monday, I'm going to do the thing, and you promise yourself, you swear to yourself you can actually do it this time. Monday comes and you're like nah, and you're like fuck it, and it doesn't happen. I can't even count how many times I've

done that, and it is so bloody normal. But it's the most frustrating thing when you cannot just do the things you want to do. And it's crazy because these, you know, new routines or maybe habits that you're trying to stick to. They're usually hopefully good for you. You know, could be eating better, moving your body, getting more sleep, getting off your phone. But then there's something that stops us from doing it. And I want to get into that a bit more because I am about to change

your life from someone who was a former flaky gym friend. Yes, I used to be that friend who used to bail on my friends going to the gym. I used to be like so I can't to be honest, back then, I was too hungover. I just was the flakiest gym friend. And how I went from that to someone now who has consistently exercised for over a decade. And I'm the perfect example to show you how you can actually turn this around and actually stick to the shit you want

to stick to. So if you're listening to this episode and you're like nodding your head and you're like, yes, that's bloody me. It's like you literally can't even trust your because you know you're full of shit When you're saying, come, one day, I'm going to do six thousand steps, ten thousand steps. You know you're full of it, and we're scared to even tell people because we're no, we're not going to stick to it. And it's so bloody annoying. So you don't want to listen to this whole episode.

I haven't given you guys a stepfing stone for a while, so before I get stuck into this life changing episode, I'm going to be giving you a stepfing stone for the week now. This is a book recommendation and I love it. I read it a couple months ago now. And if you're someone who you love Harry Potter as a kid, and you're into like your smart book error, you're loving your sexy books, and you know you're wanting to get back into that romanicy they call it. This

is the book for you. It's called Powerless by Lauren Roberts. If you don't know what romanicy is, it's basically fantasy mixed with romance. So it's like sexy magic people pretty much. And I live for it. Like I live for it. If you seek a smart book with people that don't have magic powers is hot, wait till you read about people that would literally kill in your honor to be with you. Like that's hot. You know. God, I'm such

a loser anyway. So the book's called Powerless and it is such a good romancy book because a lot of these types of genres, like there's a lot of world building. You got to learn about all the spells and the magic, and that can take you half the book to get into. But this one, it is so simple to get into, so easy to understand straight off the bat, that there's not this annoying amount of build up to get into, like the plot, you know what I mean. And it's

like a slow burn. Enemies to love this kind of vibe. It is amazing. I'm not going to go into it too much, but basically it's about this world where the town they got like a plague, and some people got powers and some people didn't, and basically anyone without powers has to be healed because the king believes that they're going to infect the people that have powers. It says

this on the back, so I'm not ruining it. So there's a girl who basically pretends that she has powers but she doesn't, and she comes in contact with the Prince and he's obviously very powerful, and it's just it's good. It's good. So that's sure, stephing Stone. I want you to go read Powerless or listen to it. And because right now I'm reading the second book of it, which is called Reckless. It's building, it's getting intense. I get to a point where sometimes Ryan's like what you're eating

and I'm like, please, don't read the page. And it's always why they always look at your book when you're on the page that's got like, oh, rated shit going on, that's the only time they look. You're like, seriously, dude. Anyway, moving on from sexy fairies and books, let's get stuck in today's episode. Now, as you know, your girl here has been on a health journey herself. I'll linked in the show notes below. It's a long one, but I have done some things. I have, you know, gained twenty

five kilos in a year. I lost it and then I went too far, did bikini competitions. I did the whole thing, like restricted eating to the max. I was the most unhealthy person on the planet. We already know this story, so I'm not going to go into it too much. So how did that person become person sitting here who now needs to exercise to be sane? And I literally have been able to be so consistent with it for so so long. The biggest realization you need

to realize is it's your why. The why behind you wanting to do that thing that you want to start on Monday, The why behind you wanting to start going to the gym or start an exercise routine. Now, I'm going to be very transparent here. When I first started over a decade ago, you know, I wanted to lose the weight back then and go to the gym. The only reason I was doing it is because I wanted to look a certain way. I did not care about

the health benefits. I did not care that it was going to make me live longer and it's good for everything. I was a twenty year old who wanted to look That's literally why I went. And I'm telling you now that if your why is going to be superficial and it's to surface level. You are not going to want to get up on the days where you're cold, it's rainy, you sleep wasn't very good, and life is a little bit hard, you're not going to get up and do it.

Let's be honest here, if you're why is all about looking a certain way or having abs or growing an ass that is not deep enough to keep you going on the days that are hard and keep you going to show up when life is chaotic, because life is always going to be chaotic, you're always going to have curve balls thrown at you. I was in a moonboot not long ago, and I easily could have been like nut thrown in the tower, but instead it actually motivated

me more to keep going to the gym. But it's true, guys, when life gets tough, if your why is not deep enough, you're not going to give a shit. If I offered you five hundred dollars for every day that you could get up at five am and go to the gym? Would you go even if you have to get up at four would you go to get five hundred bucks a day? Yes? You would? Majority of us would? I would, And that just goes to show when you have a bigger purpose, even when it's money, you will do the

hard things. I'm not saying I want you to flog yourself. You know, you always see all these things on the internet. Everyone's like hard with discipline, discipline, discipline, And I get it. And look, it is true. You can't rely on motivation. You need to have a form of discipline to go to make it a happen. But what I'm trying to say is if you have a deeper reason as to why you were going, then you will continue to go. We need to remember we have this one vehicle. We

have one vehicle our whole life. If someone gave you a car and they said you need to make this last your whole life. This is the only car you get. Are you going to take it in to get serviced? Are you going to look after it? You're you going to take it in and making sure all the parts are working correctly. Of course you are. But we don't do the same with our own body because I think we assume that we can just bounce back. We're resilient, and yes we are resilient, but we've only got one

of us. So you need to start being really bloody honest with yourself and be like, okay, what is something, what is a why that's going to make me turn up on the hard days. That could mean making sure your goals and these new routines you're wanting to put in place, making sure they do align with your overall life and your goals and your values as a person.

If you're someone who is pushing themselves, working extra hours and doing all this extra stuff for work, but your top values aren't material items or money or things like that, then of course it's not going to feel good. And yes, of course we need to make money to live, but do you know what I mean? You need to make sure that your goals are aligned with you as a person.

So for me, for example, some of my biggest values are you know, my family, obviously, health is a big one, and connect and when I'm doing things against those, it doesn't feel good. So that's where you need to start. Number one, we need to be looking at your why. Now. I want you to realize it's not your fault that you know, you do fall off the wagon, which again

there's no bandwagon. I want you to know that there's actually a very good reason why you tend to not follow through with the things that you want to do, and that is because of our amazing part of our body, our brain. Now, our brain likes things that are familiar. So if you're wanting to change your life or changing a simple routine, your brain it's not going to like that because your brain likes things that they can predict

because what is predictable means that you were safe. So even if familiar isn't necessarily good for you, maybe familiar for you is binge eating or drinking alcohol or talking to yourself like shit, it could be anything. As soon as you go against that, your brain it's like a red flag goes off and it's like what is this

and it starts making you self sabotage. So by having thoughts like, oh, you know, it's just too hard, I won't do it today and things like that, that is literally your brain trying to push you back to where you were before because it's trying to keep you safe. So you understanding the psychology of our brain and how our brain actually works. It is such an incredible asset, but it can be our worst enemy, and that is

because it just wants you to stay the same. Now Here is the biggest hack that I'm about to give you to actually be sticking to follow through with the things that you want to do, and I'm going to give quite specific examples for this. Now. One of the main reasons you can't stick to the routine and goals that you've been setting yourself out for is because you don't allow for the ups and downs of life. You don't allow for low energy days and high energy days

because you were not a robot. You are not going to feel the same every single day your energy levels are like this, especially if you're female. We're like this, like a bloody roller coaster. Like I know, I'm on a roller coaster, that's for sure. We need to understand that we are not a machine that is always going to feel the same every single day. There are days we're going to be more tired. There's going to be

days we're more motivated. There's going to be days and weeks and months where we're not feeling great and that's okay. And the reason why you keep failing it sticking to these routines is you don't allow a buffer for that. You don't allow for high and low energy days. You only have this one cookie cut of thing in place for yourself and when you don't meet that, you get upset with yourself and you get pissed off and you think you're a failure and then you just give up. Now,

how are we going to combat this? The way we're going to do this, my friends, is by having a high and low energy day routine. Now this, I'm going to give you an example for maybe morning routines to start off with. I want you to kind of have like a menu. I want you to have a menu of a high energy selection and a low energy selection. So when it's say your morning routine and you wake up and you've got low energy, you're not going to then be like I should have done XYZ because you didn't,

You're going to feel like a piece of shit. You're going to be like, I want to look at the low energy side and then you're going to select your routine from there. And it makes so much sense, like why would we push ourselves to do things on a high energy level when we're not there? And that's when your consistency will die because you give up. So, for an example, a high energy morning routine for me is I get up usually like four forty five, and I

will do my deep work. So this is project work that I really just want to smash out for the kids. Wake up and do that. I do it tidy, I do meditation and a journal, take the kids to school, go to the gym, and come back. So that's more like the goal. That's like the ideal kind of morning routine. Now this is kind of more of a medium energy, I feel. But I'm going to give you a couple

of different options. Instead of me working on that deep project, which I normally would like to do for two hours in the morning, I'll be doing that for an hour. And then instead of doing a big clean up, taking the kids to school and gown the gym, what I'm going to do is I do a quick tidy and then I take the kids to school, I come home and I will just go for a walk. So I won't even go to the gym that day. If I

fill up to it later, I will go. Now, this is me still ticking the boxes of moving my body. I still do my mindfulness. I will still do my journaling and meditation. Sometimes it means my meditation is going to be even three minutes long instead of ten minutes, And that's okay. You need to have different strategies in place for how you're feeling. And then there's going to be some mornings where I've got absolutely no energy and I won't even get to do my deep work project,

and that's okay. I will choose sleep over it because it's important that I can get that rest so I can get myself back to feeling high energy again. And this also goes the same for workout routines. So for example, my ideal week the gym is I actually like to go five six times a week. Does that always happen? No, some weeks I'll be happy to go three to four times a week, and one of those could be a very low energy walk or something like that. You need

to have different options for yourself. So what I want you to do after you finished listening to this podcast, I want you to sit down and whatever routine that you've wanted to have in place, I want you to create two options for yourself. You can even make three options, a high, medium and a low energy, so at least you know on the weeks that you do have low energy, you're not just throwing in the tower because you're frustrated because you missed one session or you missed one thing.

You're giving your self leniency to be human, and that means you can still do the thing three or four times that week. But maybe it's a low energy You're not going to go do boxing. Maybe instead you're going to do pilates, or you're going to go for a walk. Do you see what I'm getting at here? You need

a cater for being human? All right? Before I move on to the third hack and the third reason why you don't follow through with the routines you tell yourself you're going to do, I'm going to give you a bit of a recap. So the first thing you need to be focusing on is your why. Making sure your why is deep enough and not surface level, so when things get hard and life gets hard, you will continue to do the thing you say you're going to do. Now, number two, you are not catering to having high and

low energy days. So what you're going to do is you're going to create your high and low energy routines for whatever it is, morning routine, evening routine, cleaning routine, exercise, whatever it is. I want you to create those. Now we're moving on to reason number three, and that is because you don't trust yourself. Now touched on this earlier, But if you had a friend that continuously failed on you when you went to the gym and they come up to you and they say, hey, I'll see at

six o'clock one morning, I'll be here. Let's do an exercise session together. Are you going to believe that they're going to turn up the next day? Of course not absolutely not. So why do you think you would trust yourself after all of the years, of the times that you've said to yourself, I'm going to do XYZ and then you don't follow through with it because you don't trust yourself, and self trust is the biggest confidence booster you can do. When you don't trust yourself, you are

going to experience things like extreme imposter syndrome. You're going to experience very low self worth, very low confidence. And it's because if you can't even trust yourself, you're not even betting on you, and that is a big problem. But there are some ways that you can build that

self trust up. And once you start doing these things, I cannot explain to you the amount of confidence you're going to feel within yourself, but not only in that one area of your life, whether that's health or whatever in all areas of your life. When you start to show up and do the things you say you're going to do, you are going to feel so empowered. You will start to then realize that you can do things

you never thought you could of. You were going to actually start believing the things that come out of your mouth and the things that you think of. Now, how are you going to do this? The first thing you're going to do to build self trust is starting small, and I mean starting small. I don't want you to say, okay, I want to do this. You know you're going to create your high and low energy routines and things like that.

That's all well and good, but I want you to focus on just one thing, just for this week, one thing that you know is achievable and is small, and you can do every single day to prove to yourself that you can trust yourself. Now, this could be something like stretching for five minutes. It could literally be getting out of your journal or a piece of paper and setting a timer for two minutes and just writing whatever

comes to your head. It could be putting an alarm on your phone to put your phone down by a certain time. Just do something so small that you know you can achieve. Could be five minute walks every day, and once you start doing that, you and your brain will be able to be like, oh shit, this girl means business, and you're going to start to trust yourself.

And this also leads into setting realistic goals, So not setting yourself up for failure by being really realistic about where you're at, how your life works, and what you can fit in. So setting this small, tangible goal every day that's realistic that you know you will achieve. The next thing is celebrating the small winds, so the smores of things for me, like I will celebrate the emails

I put off. I will celebrate finally mpering out that bloody junk draw that I keep staring at even right now, I'm looking me in my office and there's a draw that's full of like cables I don't need to deal with. Once I finally do that, you feel that hit of dopamine because you finally achieved the thing you wanted to achieve. So really celebrating small wins could be cleaning out your car, could be anything tiny, but actually let yourself sit there

and relish in the fact that you did it. That's going to help me with self trust massively, because it's all well on good to set these goals and tick them off like little boxes. But if you're not actually celebrating yourself, there's no joy in it. It's just another thing to do. And lastly, another thing that can really help is having a non flaky accountability partner, so someone

that you can maybe test the scary waters with. So maybe you want to start going to Pilate's, have a friend that will go with you, that's not old Steph, that's flaky as hell, that's going to battle and go to Bloody Mackers. Go together, because having an accountability partner is also you're going to shop for them. There's no way you're going to flake on them. You're not old Steph. You're not an asshole like I was. You are a good friend and you'll show up. So if you have

that accountability partner, that is going to help immensely. Anyways, Guys, I hope this episode helped. Please let me know if you have any other topics you want me to talk about, if there's any guests you'd love to have on the show. This, again, I feel, is such an important episode and It is just good to be able to have that self trust so you can continue to go through life and not be beating yourself down because you are not sticking to

this crazy routine you've set out for yourself. You've got your high and low level energy routines, you've got your why and your purpose, and you're building your self trust every single day. Anyways, I love you and I'll see you guys next week. Bye. Thank you guys so much for tuning in today's episode of Stepping Up. I don't want this to be just another podcast that you listen to you get inspiration and then you don't take action.

If there's been something in this episode that will help you step up into the best version of yourself, open up your trusted planner and make a plan. And if you've loved listening to today's episode, take a screenshot and show me where you've been listening from. I love seeing it. Make sure you tag us at Stepping Up and steph Pace Underscore on Instagram so we can see it. And make sure you subscribe because you won't want to miss what's coming up next week.