The 1 per-centers

How did the British cycling team go from being so bad that one major bike manufacturer wouldn’t supply them because it was bad for its reputation, to winning 178 world championships, 66 Olympic and Paralympic gold medals and five Tour de France victories in ten years? Consciously sweating the small stuff!

Each tiny improvement to the bikes, the prep, the athletes’ clothes, training, nutrition, and even sleep, accumulated to a giant leap for cycling-kind.

Nutrition and fitness for the ordinary person are the same. We have all started our ‘diets’ on New Year’s Day, on Monday or the first of the month. Building a business is the same. Making significant change in a business is the same - we have all experienced the joys of a big bang ‘from today it’s going to be different’ cultural change program.

We try to make significant changes, all at once and once and for all. We may be lucky, it might work. It might work for a long time. But our brains and bodies are the masters of ‘homeostasis’ (the tendency towards a stable equilibrium, or ‘resistance to change’), and far too clever for their own good.

So, what's the answer… sneaking change up on ourselves so we don’t even notice…

WHAT?!!!

Let me use a nutrition/diet example here, but it’s the same for anything, including reorganising our lives, finances, houses/wardrobes, or any other aspect of behavioural change. And implementing major organisational change or any other type of business activity.

We all know what we are aiming for nutrition-wise – a balanced diet that meets our nutritional needs and has limited nasties. And, realistically, we all know this means eating (and drinking) a wide variety of multi-coloured, non-processed food and drinks. Backed up by good sleep and good hydration and getting off our butts regularly and we are ‘cooking on gas’, as they say. Simples (yes really, it is that simple).

All the ‘diets’ and ‘lifestyles’ out there are really aimed at moving us in this direction. They may exclude all sorts of things along the way in order to create a structure that forces you down this path, but at their core, much of it is the same theory. And the ones that aren’t, are not going to meet the ‘meet our nutritional needs’ criteria.

So, if we are going to throw out all the ‘diets’, and quick fix solutions to gaining $X revenue in a month, how do we get there? One step at a time.

With nutrition the steps look like this, they are easily translatable to other areas of your life:

Step 1 – MONITOR - write down everything you eat and drink for a few days, ideally a full week so that we catch the ‘blowing the doors off’ at the weekend – Every. Single. Morsel.

Step 2 – ASSESS - have a good hard look. Identify some low hanging fruit (the afternoon hot chocolate habit, the food off the kids’ plates, the biscuits in front of the telly, the five, six and seven glasses of red on Friday night that you had kidded yourself was just two). Now identify what you think is your worst area as a whole – is it eating in the evenings, the portion sizes, the snacking during the day, or the drinking all weekend perhaps?

Step 3 – CHOOSE YOUR ROUTE - decide whether you want to start with the low hanging fruit or the biggest area of weakness. What is more realistic or comfortable for you?

Step 4 – TAKE ONE STEP - think about how could you make that 1 per cent better this week? What could you really commit to as an ongoing change?

For instance:

If it is a low hanging fruit path you want, could you commit to one less coffee a day or going from large to a small – not both, just one or the other. Remember it’s just 1 per cent.

If you decide you want to start by making your weekday breakfasts healthier, is it logistically easy for you to switch that blueberry muffin to a bran or wholemeal muffin?

Or maybe it’s your lack of breakfast that is leading to bad eating habits during the day, so could you add a piece of wholegrain toast to your first coffee order?

Perhaps you recognise you grab a milky coffee every time you are thirsty and you could add a few glasses or water in or switch out an afternoon coffee for peppermint tea….

Step 5 – EMBED - do this thing. Do it CONSISTENTLY for two weeks (or in a business sense one good realistic cycle of business activity). Then think about the next 1 per cent.

Step 6 – TAKE ANOTHER STEP - repeat step 5

Step 7 – TAKE ANOTHER STEP - repeat step 5…

You get the picture.

Once you have one area of change under control you can move on to thinking about another area that you could start working on. You don’t have to get each area perfect before you move on, but get it good and consistent before you think about more.

And if you slip up, don’t give up. Just move back 1 per cent. Take that last change back, get consistent again and try again.

I promise you, 1 per cent at a time will get you a hell of a long way in life and in business more quickly than you think. Afterall, it won a really ugly skinny British guy a yellow jersey and made him a household name in just three years!

(I am certified NASM personal trainer and Precision Nutrition coach.)