Why habits help you SHOW UP!

A sneak peak at my Sticky Habit Method course.

This week, my podcast listeners get an exclusive sneak peak into my new Sticky Habit Method course. In the introduction to the course you'll learn about what's to come for those that continue on, but also my deeply personal experience. I can clearly see the difference in myself between when I have felt supported by habits and when I have not been.

Having sound habits that actually align with your values allows you to show up as your best self for you and for others. This introduction explains the three course modules that teach you, and commit you, to forming at least one hugely supportive habit by the end of the course.

About a few other things...

Reclaim your creative power and rediscover who you actually are! If you’re ready to come back home to yourself, to be able to say that you know who you are and what matters to you, take my foundation course, “Finding Me.” It’s OK that you’ve lost parts of yourself along the way; but as you learn to anchor back into who you are and align your life to what matters to you, you’ll find that you have more strength, more fulfilment, and more creativity to bring to your important roles and responsibilities.

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SHOW NOTES
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Songs Credit: Pleasant Pictures Music Club

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to the Sticky Habit Method. I'm Monica Packer and I am so overjoyed that you are here.

I wanted to introduce myself by sharing a little bit about my own story and how I learned that habits matter and why they matter to me. I know that you're going to relate to this in many ways, whether or not you can relate to my exact same experience.

It all started for me when I realized that my lack of supportive habits was not only hurting me; it was hurting the people that I loved.

I'll set the scene for you. This was about seven years ago and we had three small children. We had a four year old girl, a two year old boy and a couple months old baby boy. We were living in the San Francisco Bay Area. My husband worked in the city about six days a week and we saw so little of him that my poor little daughter called him, Brad, instead of dad for years. This was the time of our life where we had little opportunity for support. I was really far from family; I was not in the habit of asking for help from neighbors or friends yet, although I learned; and we did not have the financial means for me to get outside support.

As primarily a stay-at-home mom of my little children, everything that fell to childcare, home management, car taxes, anything finances, anything outside of my husband's work came on my shoulders. And while I really wanted that position, I found that I was super struggling to show up to those roles and responsibilities that I held.

I was doing everything I could to be a good mom. That meant I was very responsible for anything that had to do with habits with my children, like laundry, meal management, cleaning, and the list went on. But for my own habits, there were only two "should" habits in place: I should exercise. I should do spiritual study.

And while those are both great, they were still only in place in my life because I thought they were the only kind of habits I could take time for myself outside of my responsibilities. With so much to do, so little time, so little money to spend outside of what we needed, I thought it was both impractical and honestly selfish to have any habit to call my own; that made me feel like ME.

In the past, I had been a diligent habit maker. And because of that, I knew that I did not have time for the all or nothing models I'd followed in the past. It was unrealistic for me.

Because of that, all of my personal self care habits were all over the map: sleeping, eating, just to name a few. And then there's all the other supportive habits, ones that made me feel like myself: reading,creativity, time for music, dancing, art . . . All of those things were totally out of my life. My soul became so malnourished, and because of that, I was showing up in ways that not only were not me, they terrified me.

I had a series of moments that really put me in my place. And one of them I'm going to share with you right now. And I cannot ever forget it.

One warm afternoon. I had my two oldest out on the back patio with a small bottle of bubbles to play with. I was inside nursing the baby and starting to tidy up and clean the kitchen. And that's when I heard an ear splitting scream from the outside. I ran out there and saw my oldest, my 4 year old daughter, with that bottle of bubbles laying on its side and all the liquid pouring out. And she's just standing and staring and screaming.

"It's okay." I said, "I got this. It's all right." I had the baby on my hip, got everyone out of the liquids, got the hose, and began cleaning it all off. And as I'm spraying it down, I hear another ear splitting cry from inside. I run inside and I find my daughter in her tiny room with a big bottle of bubbles.

Now, somehow she had found the refill bottle that was inside deep in her closet, unscrewed the cap and, you guessed it, it was now on its side and the liquid was pouring out of it. The liquid was seeping onto our wool rug that covered our 70 year old wood floors, neither of which I could pay to replace or get fixed.

This is when I went into fight or flight mode. I put the baby somewhere, got a bucket and I was starting to scrub and scrub and scrub those bubbles as fast as I could, because I knew that it would ruin the rug and the wood floor. And as I was scrubbing, you know what happened? That liquid, it began to lather.

And as I scrubbed the atherl, it kept growing and growing and growing into a mountain of bubbles. And no matter what I did, no matter how hard I scrubbed, no matter what I tried, I could not fix it. This is when I went into full drama mode, D R A M A all caps drama. I began wailing and gnashing my teeth, screaming on the top of my lungs, I"'m the only one who has to clean this up. No one else can do this!" Over and over and over, I was screaming and in the middle of one of my screams, I turned to see my two oldest kids standing in the doorway with the most terrified looks on their faces before they ran away.

This was one of those life shifting moments for me.

And again, it was one of many where I realized that I was not myself anymore, that I was not showing up in the way I wanted to and needed to for my responsibilities. It was time for me to do something to change.

I started with therapy and began working on some unhealthy things from my past. And I also began to work on some other things in my life that I had put on the back burner, like some old interests I'd had, including personal development. And as I gave myself time and space away from my responsibilities, even though they are still there, I found myself learning and growing and becoming me again. Bit by bit, I felt more like myself.

The changes were so gradual though that I didn't really fully notice just how much I had changed until I had another very dramatic time in my life that helped me see just how differently I was showing up.

This was now two years later, right before the birth of our fourth child, we still lived in that extra tiny home. And we had a series of unfortunate events happen in our family. The first being a botched kitchen renovation. Again, we had a super small home. So having our kitchen gone was like having half our home gone.

And the rest of the home was totally covered in construction dust and kitchen stuff. Like cereal boxes in our bedrooms. The reason our kitchen was botched is because the man we hired to help work alongside us, had no idea what he was doing. And we didn't know that until the city came to pass different things for the permit, not a single thing passed. Every thing that this man had his hands on, had to be completely torn out and done again.

And he ran off with all the money we had given him. As I was preparing myself to give birth to this fourth child, we barely got drywall up in time, but we had no cupboards, no counters, no running water in our kitchen at all. To top it off, our toilet basically exploded and we had to get a new toilet and then our car broke down.

Brad drove me to the hospital to deliver our fourth child in a borrowed car, but that's when the real drama began. I had a safe delivery, but a little over a week later. I could see signs in my baby that something was really wrong. And luckily, because he was my fourth baby, I had doctors listen to me as I pressed for test after test after test.

And the final test showed that my mother's instinct was right and that this baby was in grave danger. In fact, he was dying in my arms. He had twisted bowels in his tummy and they had to whisk him off for emergency surgery. And as they did that, they prepared us for the worst. So much was unknown with the surgery.

And even if it went okay, there was still so much unknown in his recovery. How much of his bowels he'd have to have cut out and sewn back together if you'd even be able to have any, the list of dangers and drama, the list of dangers and unknown was vast. And this was a moment for me, a recognition of the shifts that I had had.

Yes, I was stressed. Yes. I was overwhelmed and anxious for my baby, but the way I was showing up to these difficulties was completely different than the ways that I had showed up to spilled milk, spilled bubbles, sweeping up crumbs, just a few years before. I felt strong. I felt stable. I felt like myself.

What had changed? I had, and as part of this years long transformation process, my habits had changed too. I was so much more supported internally than I had been years ago. From bubbles to bowels we all have drama in our lives. D-R-A-M-A, drama. We all have hard times, big responsibilities, people who need us, so little time, very little money and lots of interruptions to boot, and still, we need to be able to show up.

The sticky habit method is designed for real women who want to create real habits so that they can show up to their lives. Maybe you're like me and you have a really tricky relationship with habit formation, maybe in the past, you were an overachiever and you did everything habit oriented with the all or nothing mindset.

Maybe you're also like me and you became an extreme underachiever and you struggled to create habits or goals or dreams or anything like it because you knew it was impractical and unrealistic for you to do the all of the all or nothing model anymore. I am here to teach you and to show you that you can create habits that stick with real interruptions, with little time, and little external support.

Here's the biggest problem we face as women. We have been taught habits wrong. I have a whole free class on that. That's here as a bonus in the course, but the ways we've been taught habits are for robots. As women we need a lot more flexibility with our habits.

We get interrupted more. It's harder to be consistent. It's impractical for us to do crazy amounts all at once. I know all of this, personally, as part of my years in uncovering and exploring who I was, I also became super fascinated with habit formation. I read so many books. I attended courses, I did trainings and over and over and over again, I found the ideas were great.

I found the tips were stable. I found the research was even solid. But I found it wasn't applicable to my life as a woman. And I found this with my clients too. So as a coach for women who want to get off the sidelines, I began to take the best of what I learned in the habit world. And I filled in the gaps with my own research and my experimentation.

And with these clients over the years, I have formed what I now call the sticky habit method. Through the sticky habit method, you will learn how to create supportive stable habits that will transform your real life. It's real habits for real women. You'll leave the course with at least one hugely supportive habit and the know-how and confidence you need to build more supportive habits the rest of your life, so that when the drama comes in from bubbles to bowels, you will be able to show up for yourself and for your people.

I want to give you a sneak peek on what this course will entail. We have three modules and each module has three lessons.

Let's break down each of these modules for you. Module one is all about redefine. This is where you will make important mindset shifts and habit design shifts.

The second module is called revolutionize. This is where you will learn all about my sticky habit method and how to make habits that last.

And the third module is refine. This is where you will learn how to implement a Keystone habit of your choice. Practice the method for yourself and learn how to build on from there.

As part of each lesson, I'll have some action steps for you to take, and this is just a way for you to actually make progress in this course. The next little section is all about best practices, and I'll give you some advice on how to proceed with the course.

But for now I have two action steps for you. The first is to take the pre-course assessment. This will not sound fun because it sounds like school and I'm a former teacher. So I apologize, but there are going to be some school elements here. This pre-course assessment will not go well for you and that's okay.

You're supposed to do poorly in this assessment. This is just our way of seeing where you're at, because by the end of the course you will take the same assessment and it will be a lot better for you. So take the pre-course assessment now, show up messy. It's okay.

The second action step I have for you is a little different. This is where I would encourage you to come up with a token that will remind you of your commitment to this course. And through that, your commitment to yourself, as you show up to this course. I have a small suggestion for you, maybe a bottle of bubbles. Do you have one lying around your house, maybe a small bottle of bubbles, or maybe you can pick one up from the store next.

Regardless of what it is, I want it to be something that is simple, that you can put in a place that you frequent often, whether it's your kitchen or your car or your desk at work, wherever it is so that when you pass by the small token, it can trigger a reminder in you. That you want to show up to this course and as part of that, show up for yourself,

Again, I'm so glad you're here. I cannot wait for you to learn the sticky habit method and find real habits that will help you change your real life. Thanks for being here.