Learn how the simple rule of momentum (and not motivation) will help you to build a new habit and stick to it for good.

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For an entire year, as soon as I wake up, I pop out of bed and go for a morning walk.

My biggest tip to enjoying a successful morning routine rule is to avoid letting my children be my alarm clock. 

Well, my kids are early risers, so I must wake up before them and get a few things done to set the intentions for my day. 

Because I’ve noticed that if I don’t prioritize myself first thing in the morning, I’m more apt to be a rage monster with little to no patience for their shenanigans.

That morning walk happens at 5:30 a.m. Every single day. Weekends included.

To be fair: I do skip days when the weather is less than awesome. I’m not some Discipline Warrior that’s going to go for a walk in the middle of a driving rainstorm. That just sounds stupid to me.

The sun is barely up (in fact, it’s totally dark during the Fall and Winter months) and there’s barely anyone stirring in my usually buzzing section of Brooklyn. 

The soundtrack to my morning walk is an audiobook or a podcast. Occasionally, I’ll go with no technology at all and just be with my own thoughts. 

This walk has helped me:

• Build more focus on my many projects
• Learn some new things since I’m listening to podcasts and audiobooks and taking notes while I walk
• Reduce stress and that anxiety around trying to cram everything into my morning
• Burn a ton of calories and get into the best shape of my life

I was not motivated to do this daily walk, like at all. 

It’s cold and dark here in Brooklyn at 5:00 a.m.

But I was able to build this new habit by focusing on one simple premise: Momentum over motivation. 

It’s now been a year and I’m still going strong with that walk. 

Here’s how to apply this rule of momentum to build a new habit and make it stick for good.

Let’s get into it. 

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Using tiny steps to build a new habit

The previous iteration of my morning routine was fresh out of the pages of all the productivity gurus:

Wake up. 

Eat the frog. In other words: perform the most important task of my day without distractions.

Engage in some meditation and deep breathing along with some cold exposure if possible. Cold showers and guided meditation using my Calm app. 

Writing no matter what. Every night before bed, I left a writing prompt for me to tackle first thing in the morning. And it had to be at least one page, but I set a lofty goal of 1,000 words.

This elaborate morning routine started becoming more of a chore than a treasure. 

I was getting anxious about having to check off all of the boxes to satisfy productivity. 

And then on the off chance that a child would pop up early (sometimes my kids wake up before 6:00 a.m.) … I’d actually get annoyed at them for disrupting my routine.

In other words, I was missing the plot entirely.

So I embraced the idea of a slow morning routine.

Less productivity. More just vibing with what I needed and wanted to do.

Slow everything the hell down to stop worrying about doing some cold plunge followed by an interpretive dance and chasing that down by drinking goat piss (organic, of course). 

Instead, I started lacing up my shoes to go for a walk.

Walking is the most underrated exercise on the planet, and the most accessible. 

When you look at some of the Blue Zones on Earth, the areas where the local population tend to have the highest rates of longevity, walking is one of the common principles from every culture that lives the longest.

Walking:

• Promotes better digestion
• Improves mental clarity
• Makes you more creative
• Burns extra calories

My morning walk helps me get into the right frame of mind to start my day. 

I listen to my podcast or my audiobook and bring a field notes pocket notebook so I can jot down ideas.

In fact, this article idea came as a note in that very same book (“talk about how I built the habit of my daily walk” was the cue).

This is called habit stacking and it’s a great little trick to build a new habit by taking an existing behavior (in my case, walking) and combining it with another (learning).

You can do the same to build a new habit like reading, healthy eating or exercise:

• Reading one page of a book before bed
• Adding protein to one meal per day
• Performing 10-20 squats while your coffee brews 

Exercising in spurts is this something I cover in my guide to exercise snacking and micro workouts (here’s the free guide, too).

The simple equation that will help you build a new habit

To bake this in, I had to start at the basic habit-building blocks by keeping it as simple as possible.

Stanford professor and author BJ Fogg developed an equation that will help you determine how to create a new behavior:

B = MAP

(Where B stands for Behavior, M for Motivation, A for Ability and P for Prompt)

He breaks this down in his book Tiny Habits:

“A behavior happens when the three elements of MAP – Motivation, Ability and Prompt – come together at the same moment. Motivation is your desire to do the behavior. Ability is your capacity to do the behavior. And prompt is our cue to do the behavior.”

– B.J. Fogg, Tiny Habits

In my case, the Motivation was there to make a change to my routine.

And I definitely had the Ability. 

I had the time during the early morning hours, walking was easily accessible to do first thing. It wasn’t like I had to pop out of bed and deadlift or suffer through a CrossFit workout.

For the Prompt, I made it as easy as possible.

Read that again.

Every night before I’d hit the pillow, I’d make sure my clothes were laid out and ready to go, including any layers I’d need in the cooler mornings.

At first, I also made the new habit easy to execute. 

All I wanted to do was walk around the block. It didn’t have to be a full-on 30-minute walk, just five to 10 minutes tops.

“Make it easy” is also the first rule of habit building by author James Clear of Atomic Habits.

And a five to 10 minute walk around the block was super easy. 

My goal was to just get comfortable with the practice of waking up and instead of heading over to my desk to write, it was time to shift the focus to getting dressed and going for a walk.

Over time, I’d add more distance, but I just had to go around the block to make the motivation factor as easy as possible.

Ask yourself these two questions to build a new habit that sticks  

No habit will form just because. 

There needs to be some intention behind whatever behavior you’re trying to develop. 

The first step is figuring out: What is it that you actually want?

Is it to be more active and knock out that workout? 

To use the time wisely for building your personal brand and business? 

Write that book? 

Or just to take a few minutes to yourself before the day gets really crazy?

All of the above are valid goals, but they of course come with different behavioral approaches.

Of course, I’m partial to my 4 Pillar approach to designing a lifestyle of more meaning and fulfillment, which I talk about in my post here.

If you’re reading this and getting inspired about starting your own morning routine, rest assured it doesn’t take much, only 15 minutes of prioritizing your time and focus on those 4 Pillars will yield fantastic results.

You’ll next want to ask yourself why. 

Why is this your goal? 

Is it actually serving you to develop a new behavior approach? 

Motivation is not enough. 

You’ll need a system to keep you consistent on the days when you are not feeling it. Even the smallest, tiniest, steps are enough to keep that momentum going on those days when you aren’t motivated. 

But, you’ll never even start if you simply don’t care about this behavior goal in the first place.

It’s not easy to add or change behaviors, so if you’re just doing it just because this dude on the Internet told you so, that’s probably not going to provide enough intrinsic motivation to keep going.

Get clear on what it is that you want, and why you want it. 

But how long is it actually going to take to form a new habit?

The walking habit and my slow morning latched on pretty quickly because I realized early on that it was enjoyable. 

But, that’s not always the case. 

Sometimes, it’s going to take continued, deliberate practice to bake this in. 

You might need to stay super simple with that behavior (like the five minute walk) for quite some time before you add more layers.

For me, the most important part of the process: I avoided being rigid about it.

If some mornings, I felt like journaling a bit more instead of reading, that was fine. 

On other mornings, if I didn’t want to listen to any audiobook or podcast at all, no worries. 

And then if my schedule is super tight and I realize that my morning writing will suffer if I don’t take action early, I simply prioritize that over my walk.

Stop asking yourself “How long will this take?” and start focusing on the most important (yet overlooked) rule of behavior change: Making it consistent.

This is where the momentum makes all the difference. 

You can’t just start a new behavior, half-ass your way through it for 30 days and expect to have a brand new behavior because some arbitrary rule says, “Building a new habit takes 30, 60 or even 90 days.”

Fogg explains why this is just not true.

“Any advice you hear about a habit taking twenty-one or sixty days to fully form is not entirely accurate. There is no magic number of days. Why? Because the formation time of a habit depends on three things: The person doing the habit. The habit itself (the action). The context.”

– B.J. Fogg, Tiny Habits

So, to answer the question:
It’s going to take as long as it takes for you to build a new habit successfully by being as consistent as possible for as long as possible until it sticks.

You must also understand the role of momentum

Think back to a time when you were eating healthy and then all of the sudden, life or kids or work happened, you snowballed down the junk food rabbit hole and blew up your diet.

A few days became a few weeks and then you were pissed off because you fell off the wagon and couldn’t get motivated to eat healthy again.

Losing momentum is super easy. 

Regaining momentum is super hard.

Therefore, keeping momentum is the key to long-term victory if you want to build a new habit.

To do so, I want you to commit to never missing consecutive cues.

In other words, if I miss my walk one morning, I cannot miss my walk the next morning. 

It’s a simple way to make sure you’re staying on point.

Never. Miss. Twice.

Write it down and schedule it to build a new habit

I wrote down the exact process of my morning with the various things I wanted to achieve and practice:

Wake up at 5:15 a.m.

Hit the ground walking by 5:30 a.m.

Return to the house by 6:05 a.m.

Practice some mindfulness with deep breathing, followed by reading until the coffee finished brewing around 6:40 a.m.

Wake up the kids at 6:45 a.m. to get them ready for school. 

While they’re wiping the sleep out of their eyes and going potty, I’m waiting for my coffee to brew and performing a five-minute mobility routine. 

I was able to generate enough momentum with my tiny approach to walking. Five minutes turned into 15 minutes, which eventually turned into 30 minutes. 

This allowed me to build a new habit and then turn that into an entire morning routine that worked for me.

In order to hold myself accountable, I mapped all of this out, wrote it down (you are 42-percent more likely to achieve a goal if you write it down). And then I even scheduled it all into my calendar for a while.

Now when the workday actually starts for me, I find myself more productive and creative. And far less likely to be a rage monster with my kids.

Now it’s your turn: build a new habit by focusing on momentum, not motivation

Take it slow. Make it small. Stay as consistent as possible. And never miss twice.

You now have the guidance to crush any goal and turn that desired behavior into a life-long habit. Just like my morning walks.

I hope you enjoyed this newsletter. As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out. 

If you’re interested in working with me to get a complete body transformation program that couples minimalist training with a personalized approach to nutrition (no calorie counting here), then you should check out my Lean4Life Coaching Program.

I answer all of my emails at pete [at] petecataldo [.] com … Hit me up with the subject line “how to build a new habit” and I’ll answer any questions you have to make this work for you.

Until next time,
Pete