10 Habits That Will Fix 99% Of Your Problems

If you're not satisfied with your life right now, it's time for a transformation. I'm going to share the 10 habits that will solve 99% of your problems and completely change your life.

Habit number one: Start the day on your terms. Why is everyone always interested in morning routines? We talk about how people start the day all the time, especially as it pertains to success. But is it because there is one clear way to begin each day and that's how you go on to achieve your goals? Absolutely not. Every single person is different, and so is the season of life that they're currently in. The reason the morning matters is because it's your opportunity to make that first decision of the day. By saying, "I'm going to make an intentional start," you are agreeing to make good on a promise to yourself, and that is a tone you want to set for the day, especially when we know it's going to go awry at some point. We cannot dictate the perfect terms of every single day, all the time. As a matter of fact, if you can remember a single day in the past that you were able to determine exactly how every second of it went, that would be impressive. I bet you can't name one. So by being clear that you want to start the day on your terms and actually following through on that, you're showing yourself what you have the ability to do when you make and keep promises, not just for other people, but for yourself.

In my book, "Good Morning, Good Life," I talk about the three morning moments to make it a great way to start the day: Movement, Mindfulness, Mastery. Movement: Get the body moving. Do what you need to do to feel good. Mindfulness: How do you do what you need to clear your mind and get it ready for what you need the rest of the day? And Mastery: How do you get better at the thing that you want to become a master at? What time do you need to put in? What tasks do you need to try? What practice do you need to apply?

But what if you just did one thing? One that you promised would be how you start the day, according to what you need in your life in this moment? What's the hardest thing you could do? What's the biggest thing you could promise yourself that if you got it done before 9:00 a.m. would make the rest of the day feel absolutely incredible? Maybe you have to make a tough phone call, and so you try to get it out of the way as early as you can. Maybe you're trying to write just a page of that book that you hope to publish someday. Promise yourself that you'll do one thing that starts the day on your terms, so you feel like you've accomplished one of the biggest things in your life and makes every other decision the rest of the day that much easier to follow through on. Every time you start the day on your terms, you show yourself you will show up and deliver on a promise you made yourself, and when you do that, you can achieve anything.

Habit number two: Write everything down. Here's why writing everything down is so important: What's written is remembered. What's remembered is acted upon. So while we we do a lot of scrolly-scroll and we do a lot of hearing what's happening in the world, the news, reading tweets, whatever the case may be, we think we remember those things because we read it and we may have absorbed it, but you haven't truly processed something until you've written it down. So when was the last time that you actually read something, heard something, got a cool fact, heard a new tactic you want to try, and you just go, "Oh, I got that back there. I'll remember to do it later," and forgot about it until someone said it again and you go, "Oh yeah, I knew that." Taking the time to write it down would have helped you process it so that you would be more likely to take action on it.

This is important for when we have those fleeting thoughts throughout the day: things we have to do, appointments we have to go to, birthday gifts we have to buy, whatever the case. "I want to do that project." "That's a great idea for that campaign." "Oh, I should make a video about that." All of those ideas, if not written down, they get lost up here. And that's not just bad losing ideas; it's bad for our brain to try to organize all that information. But if we knew we took an idea that was worth something out of our mind and processed it onto paper, you're basically checking the box in your brain that you did something with it. It feels better. There's relief there, and you can use more of your mind for the important things: making decisions, getting into the right headspace to be the best possible version of yourself. Write everything down, if for no other reason than to get give yourself some relief. We put so much pressure on our brains to carry so much, but once you get something out of your mind and onto paper, that is the first step to it actually becoming something real for your life.

My favorite hack is to carry around a little box of note cards, index cards. They're so low-stress. They're easy to just grab and scribble something on and not romanticize. If you go buy a nice notebook at the store, you romanticize that notebook. I don't care what you say. It's so pretty. I have to use the perfect pen, and I have to do this, and I have to make sure that it's all formatted very well. "Oh, maybe I should have used a pencil because now that page is all messed up." I don't know about you, but that's how I am with notebooks. Note cards, I can just scribble away, and it's there, and I can put it back in my little note card box and check back later to see what I wrote down that I need to process, adding it to anything that's in my filing system, putting it in a project it belongs to, assigning it to a team member if that's something that they need to handle. But note cards, and I've talked about them on this channel a number of times because I'm such a fan, make it so much easier for you to not overthink what you want to write down.

The next time you have like a really fleeting, silly, no big deal thought, and you then think to yourself, "I want to remember that, but I won't write it down because that would be silly." Write it down. Write it down because here's what's going to happen: First, you get the idea out of your head. It's on paper. Now you have had to physically process it. When you have to physically process a thought, a couple of things happen. You start to judge it. You start to realize, "Whoa, that's actually a really good idea." It seems so simple, but it's a really good idea. Or you go, "Wow, that's a limiting belief that I have. I can't believe I actually wrote it down. I'm so glad I wrote it down because now I took it out of my mind, put it on paper, and I can throw it in the trash can." Actually, let's light it on fire. Sounds like you underestimate all the things you're keeping up here that if they just came out and went down onto paper, that you would know what to do with them next. My favorite thing in the world is not having a repeat thought of something that we don't need to have a repeat thought of, so especially those limiting beliefs or those challenges or anything that's depressing. You get it out, put it on paper, and look at it for how ridiculous and silly it is so that you can then say, "We're done with that."

The flip side of this is that you're just writing things down that are tasks, writing things down that got to get done, writing things down that are stressing you out that got to get addressed. It might feel like you're just coming up with a really long to-do list, which is somewhat satisfying because it's out of your head now, but it's also really stressful because to-do lists can go on forever in a day. But when you write things down, you are forced to look at them and go, "Is this a priority?" Not everything you're going to write down is a priority. Not everything you're going to write down is important. Not everything you're going to write down is urgent. Not everything you write down is important to anyone else but you. But by seeing it in front of your eyes and figuring out what's going to happen with it next, you take it to another level. And that decision-making that you're getting better at every single day begins to get flexed. You could strike out something on that note card and say, "It's never going to happen." Or you could highlight it and say, "That needs to become a top priority." This is the processing that happens when you write things down. And when you don't write them down, they don't go through that important moment of you deciding why this matters.

Habit number three: Move your body daily. Daily movement is so important for absolutely everyone. I'm not telling you what you have to do to move. I'm not telling where to go. I'm not telling you what weights you got to lift. I don't care what you do. Your body needs to move. It could be as simple as walking a little bit more than you typically would, or maybe you are doing something that's in a fitness facility that helps make you a better version of yourself. But one thing that I never really understood until these recent years was how much exerting energy in the right ways feeds you tenfold with the energy that you need to do all the things that you want to do. I used to just kick and drag my feet to the gym, hated it. Now I find myself prioritizing it earlier in the day because I know all the stuff I want to do, all the stuff that's on my priority list, all the ways I want to hang out with my kids and how I want to show up in those moments, I will have more energy and be able to do more when I have flexed my body in a way that builds more of that energy in me.

When you build this habit, it will shift in your brain, but you have to go through the push first of building the habit. At first, it's uncomfortable. At first, it's hard. At first, it's just too much. But then it becomes a consistent element of your life, and you notice how it's changing the way you think, and you notice how it's changing the way you interact with the world, and you suddenly crave it in a different way. You may not like the work of it, but you like the results of it because you see exactly how those results are showing up. One of the things my coaching clients are usually surprised to find out once they come into my world is that they are assigned daily movement. And I have clients who run the gamut: some that are in the best shape of their life, and some of them who have chronic pain that they have to deal with. And every single person that works with me still follows through on daily movement in the way that works for them because they see what happens. They listen to me. They understand there's a standard that is at play if they want their business to be leveled up 100%. And when they move their body, their mind works differently. It's more open. Their limiting beliefs are less. Their confidence goes up, and the game changes. If you want to solve problems in your life, get out of your head and move your body.

Habit number four: Put it where it belongs, every time. Are you one of those people that can't find their keys, like, all the time? Do you ever find that it drives you crazy? Drives you crazy that the most fundamental thing that operates one of the most luxurious things in your life, a motor vehicle, would go missing and literally hold you back from going places? It's one of those moments where you get so frustrated because you can't find your keys, to you can't go anywhere without your keys, and you've literally got the dumbest problem of all time keeping you right where you are. What a metaphor for life this is. Why putting everything back where it belongs, every single time, immediately as soon as it needs to go back, is one of the best things that you can do for peace of mind. You don't want to have to save room in your brain for, "Oh, my keys are in a different place today. How fun and interesting." Half of the cleaning that we have to do in our life is tidying up. And putting things back where they belong: Is the trash where the trash goes? Are the keys hung up? Where are my socks? What's the laundry system here? If it's dirty, where does it go? By having an automatic, "This is what happens every single time" process in your life, you prove that you can develop more processes that make you more efficient. And I don't know if you're familiar with business, but all businesses is putting a bunch of processes in place and making them all work together so that the machine can perform in the way that it needs to. So in the machine of your life, if you always put your keys in the same place, then you will know, you'll always be able to start your car or unlock a door with those keys. The next things that happen after that, the life that happens after that: Do I always have gas in the tank as well? All of these we have to do so much. And if we just don't check these simple boxes, the simple boxes that complete the simple processes in our life, if we don't do them, then we can't grow from the place that we're at in this moment.

It might seem like no big deal, "I'm just going to kick my shoes off over here." No big deal. But then when you never wear those shoes again for a week and you can't find them the next time you look for them, you waste precious time, you stay right where you are, and you go absolutely crazy. We have bigger fish to fry. We have bigger problems to solve. We have better places to go. So at a minimum, the things you do to keep life operable are so much more important than you think. Instead of wasting 50% of your mental bandwidth on finding things that you supposedly knew where they were, but now you don't, that's going to stunt your growth more than you could ever imagine. So next time, hang the dang keys up.

Habit number five: Keep a not-to-do list. We love keeping lists of things that we got to do. Do you have a list of things that you won't do? And it better not be inside your brain. We've got to get things out in in real life, especially when those confrontational moments come. I'll give you an example: On my not-to-do list is to attend showers, like parties that are meant to shower someone specifically, people I don't know very well. I get invited to a lot of things, and it is a beautiful, beautiful thing about my life that people want me to attend their parties. Love it. But as I've told you many times on this channel, I don't like to go to things that take time away from the things that are most important to me, like my family or my work. So I have to draw the line somewhere, and I have to say, "There's a limit to how big my family and friend circle is as it pertains to these types of occasions." Now, when this person gets married someday, I'm going to be there, right? And that person is probably close to me in some way. But I've made that active decision, and on my not-to-do list, it is to say, "I do not attend showers for people people who I see less than once a year." It's really simple. This makes that decision-making process so much easier when an invitation comes in the mail and I'm like, "Oh my gosh, how exciting!" No, no, I, I, I'm so happy for you. Can't wait to shop the registry. Love a moment to send a gift and wish you the best. But now I don't have to go through the humming and hawing and scheduling and rethinking and wishing I wasn't doing it and counting down the minutes until it's over song and dance. It's on my not-to-do list.

So when you go back and you reflect, let's say on the last year, and you say, "Wow, I did a bunch of stuff I didn't want to do." Why did I do those things? Because I felt pressured. Because someone invited me. So what else do I have to do? Write them down and say, "If I got invited to do that again right now, would I say yes or no?" And if the answer is no, put it on your not-to-do list. What are the things you never, never want to do again? Put it on your not-to-do list. Here's the very exciting news: You get to make the rules, and you get to follow the rules. You get to make the rules, and you get to follow the rules. In case no one told you that, I'm giving you that permission right now. You get to make the rules, and you get to follow your rules. Most people don't do that. They think the rules are coming to them because somebody hand-printed them on an invitation. No, no, it's just an idea. It's an idea you might love. You might be like, "These are always a hell yeah for me." But for me, I might say, "These are always a not-to-do list item," and that's no problem. I get to make the rules. I get to follow my rules, and I show myself that I have the ability to make a decision and make good on that promise to myself when I follow those rules. And it's a beautiful thing because then I take myself even more seriously about the things I'm passionate about.

Another not-to-do list item for me: I don't use my laptop when it's the evening and I'm spending time with my kids. My laptop isn't around. My laptop is at my desk. Desk is a great place for a laptop. Laptops are tricky because they travel places. My laptop is not around when I'm with my kids for a multitude of reasons. I mean, the laptop's pretty distracting, and my kids are very young, so they need my attention. But also, there shouldn't be something going on on that laptop that I planned on doing while spending time with my kids because that's conflicting. That makes no sense. So that's on my not-to-do list. I am not on my laptop when I'm spending time with with the gorgeous faces that I created. Come up with your not-to-do list, and then follow it.

Habit number six: Feed your mind daily. One of the most important things in the world that I do for myself every single day is read a book. It doesn't matter what book I read. Different books every single day. Sometimes I'll just pick up a different one, and when I'm in the middle of this one, I don't romanticize finishing a book. I get to the meat, I get to the thing that I need because I want to love reading. I don't want it to feel like a job. I want to feel like it is fueling my life. So every single day, I read from a book, usually about 10 pages, and always non-fiction, usually self-development. No offense to any other kind of book, but I just know what I need to expand my mind. Most people don't do that. They think they're expanding their mind by looking at all of the news stories or social media scrolling. And there's tons of stuff that you can get from social media and content that will expand your mind, and this might be part of your process, but there's something different about a book and the things that an author has to go through to fully communicate ideas to you in a way that is going to fundamentally shift the way you approach life. And I would recommend it to my worst enemy because I want everyone to be able to experience how earth-shattering reading books has been for the betterment of my life.

I spoke with somebody the other day, I just asked, you know, "Are you reading any good books?" because I like to see how people react to that question. And he said, "You know, I I tried to read a book once, and I just had the hardest time. Like, I just can't keep my attention on it, and I get so frustrated, and I just I just give up." And I get it because there's a misunderstanding that books are supposed to be hard, that books are supposed to be really boring, that reading is not an enjoyable process. And that bums me out because you picked up one book, and it may have left that impression on you, but there might be another one that could change your life. It's really important that you find the format that's going to help you get over that hump. If you do not read every day, is it because you do have a hard time processing words on a page? No problem. I'm not the fastest, best processing reader. I just practice. But I might have to start with audiobooks, or I might have to use an app that sums up a book a little bit more simply for me so I can get to why it was so good and so popular with a large community so that then I can say, "Okay, wait. Now I kind of get the concept. I want to read it more. I want to go at least to that chapter and get the whole context of it." You're not incentivizing yourself to read when you don't have a clear reason as to why it matters to you. That's why I'm very particular about what I read and how much I read and when I'm going to quit a book and not romanticize it because I want what I want out of this experience. I can be very selfish about reading. I don't want to be this literature nerd. I just want the best information for what I can do in this moment of my life. Feed your mind every day. You will change as a person. You will absolutely change for the better because you will have said, "I will do a little bit more than the next person to make life better for myself." Because if everyone's doing it, it's not that extraordinary. And if you are someone who is in that small percentage of people who who goes and buys a book and reads it, your life will also be truly extraordinary.

Habit number seven: Live by the "no one cares" credo. If you were to stop and reflect about your interactions with other people, the close relationships that you have, the distant relationships that you have, you might notice that you often assume that when you are interacting with someone, that it is probably all somehow about you. Whether someone asks you a question and you are expected to respond, or whether somebody's telling you a story of something that happened in their life and they want a reaction from you, or whether you're doing something that feels a little out of character, so you feel like you're on display. We find a way to make everything about us. I want you to start to go through life with this credo: No one cares. It's going to be hard. I know it's going to feel a little weird. Like when someone is talking, you might feel like you want to rush to respond, that you have an idea and you want to make sure you say it. Maybe you cut them off a little bit to chime in in the conversation to feel engaged, to show them you're engaged. It's funny how when you think you're being a strong participant in a conversation and then get accused of interrupting, how that experience was received by both parties. But when you catch yourself and you say, "You know what? I'm not going to rush to talk. No matter what comes up in this conversation, I'm just going to listen because no one cares what I have to say." Even if that's not true and it sounds really rash, just by having that thought process, you're going to be a better listener. You're going to put the attention on someone else. You're going to let them get their thoughts fully out. And then when they go, "Are you there? Are you listening? Because you're being awful quiet," you say, "Oh yeah, I was just listening to talk. I didn't want to interrupt because I wanted to make sure I fully understood what you were saying." It would be a bit of a breath of fresh air for that person, don't you think? Especially if they're used to you chiming in to the point where they're like, "Why aren't you talking? It sounds awkward. It sounds like you're disengaged. It sounds like you're not listening." But you are. You're still doing the work, but you're not making it about you and how you must have to contribute to this.

This is going to come in very handy when someone's giving you advice you didn't ask for. Just remember, no one cares. No one cares because even when someone is giving you advice, it's usually a projection from from their own life experience. They might be right. They might be telling you something with your best interest in mind. Let them. Let them do it, and just sit there and go, "No one cares what I think. No one cares what my rebuttal is to this. No one cares why I did what I did and why I'm not taking the advice they're giving me." No one cares because they're just telling you their experience from their life so that they can feel like they did you a justice because they got to let you know. So let them do it, and then say to yourself, "No one cares." If no one cares what you think and just want you to hear what their advice is, what would your response be? "Thank you for that. I'll take that into consideration."

And the last thing I'll say on this is next time you post on social media, you're going to overanalyze yourself, especially if you're my client and you know building your brand is really important. So you post some videos on your Instagram, you want to attract the right attention, but you also know that there's some attention that you'd rather not have: people who aren't your ideal client, people who might just not understand what you're doing right now. Post it anyway and tell yourself, "No one cares." Because here's what's actually happening: Even when people say to you, "I saw that weird thing you posted on social media. Why are you doing that?" It might seem like they care, but what's happening is they care about how you are and how it affects them. They're putting the responsibility on you because that's victim mentality, and you don't have to tell them this. You can just be very smart and quiet about it and just know it that they see what you're doing. They see you changing, and you changing and leaving them behind is uncomfortable. So next next time you post on social media because it's going to make your life better, it's going to build your brand, it's going to increase the amount of business that you get, and it is going to take you places you want to go, remind yourself, "No one cares." And you're going to have to post another video in a couple of hours, and a couple more tomorrow, and a lot more over the next month. And every time you do, just tell yourself, "No one cares." The wrong people might act like they care, but actually have a different reason for it. And the right people don't care until they finally see your 100th video because that's how long it took to get on their radar, and you start to get results. And you still tell yourself, "No one cares," so you stay consistent and you do what you have to do because you know what it takes to show up because you care, and that's what's most important.

Habit number eight: Calendar block your time. People love to say that they want freedom. Most people see that in their life by having a blank calendar. It feels freeing. It feels like you got a lot of room to play. But what's actually happening is there's tons of stuff on your calendar, it's just invisible. You decided not to put it there. Imagine if you marked out all the time you have to work, all the time you have to sleep, and all the time you have to do your basic responsibilities in life, and removed that time from your calendar because it is accountable somewhere. You would be left with just a little bit of white space, maybe a bit more on the weekends. You've got your evenings. How much time do you have in the mornings? And that is the space you get to decide what you're going to do with your life. This is why calendar blocking is my number one tip for most people because while we're trying to manage time, you can't. You can't manage time. It just happens. It's passing. Do you know how much time has passed since I sat down in this chair? You know more than I'd like to admit. You can't manage time. You can only manage your energy. So when you map out, "Okay, here's where most of my energy is going all the time. Where am I getting it back? How much am I getting back at the gym? How much am I getting back while I sleep?" And then where am I exerting it? In my work? Where am I exerting it in my childcare? Whatever the case. You see what you have left. Where do you want to spend that leftover energy? What is exciting and important to you? So calendar blocking shows you literally how much of this finite resource you have to work with. You only have so much time, and so using it wisely is critical. That's all anyone is doing above and beyond you. People who are successful have figured out how to use their time wisely, partially in what they actually do with their time: living, enjoying, making money, and also how they multiply time. How do I take this block of time and make it much more productive? Well, you would need to include more people, more technology, more processes to do that, and now that's creating leverage. How much energy is it going to take to make that happen? Now that's something we can manage.

So calendar blocking might sound simple, right? But for most people, they don't get it because because all they do is fill up every second of their calendar and go, "Wow, that's overwhelming. I don't want to do any of that. I'm just going to pretend like it doesn't exist." And yet, you still do the things that you're being held externally accountable for, like showing up to work or going to after-school pickup. But if you saw calendar blocking as a reflection exercise of, "Here is the state of things, and here's what I'm going to add because I want to do some things," and now I have to learn how to take away so that I can do more things I want and less things I don't want. Use calendar blocking to have that real reflection of what's happening in your life. And week after week, the more you have the same things happen on a consistent basis that you really don't want to do, you will be much more focused on how to get rid of it. And then those moments where you get to do the things that light you up, you're going to go back to your calendar and say, "How do I fit that in again?"

Habit number nine: Practice asking for help, even when you don't need it. One of the most important things that you'll ever learn in your life is how to do more by doing less. And the way that you do that is by incorporating help. For those of us ambitious women who do all the things, and we know we can do all the things, we keep doing all the things, and it hurts. We need to stop doing all the things. But the only way that you do that is by getting better at incorporating other people or resources to help you do things. So that's why I think one of the most important habits that you can create is asking for help when you do not need it. You could go switch the laundry. You could you could move everything out of the washer and put it into the dryer. I know you can do it because you do it hundreds of times a week. But what if you just asked somebody else to do it? Maybe you said to a teenager, "Hey, I need you to switch the laundry from the washer to the dryer and turn it on." You may never have given that assignment before because you just handled it because you just didn't even have to think about it. You walked by it, and you know it needs to happen. You don't even have to waste your breath on it. But you can still do that when the teenager still doesn't do it after they've been asked, or when they forget, or when someone fails you, you're always going to be able to do that task. But imagine if you just practiced asking for the help that you absolutely do not need. If we get better at asking for help in the small areas of our life, it doesn't feel as challenging to ask for the things you absolutely need critical help with. There are going to be moments when you need to ask for massive favors or for really big jobs, or you need to clearly identify what a 10 out of 10 outcome is, and you don't want the assignment to be inconvenient or awkward or bossy. We decide that that sounds that way because we're completely out of practice forever asking for someone's help in the first place. So every single day, I want you to find three things that you don't need to ask someone's help with and just ask for their help. Ask them to do it anyway. Let someone else take ownership of a task that you do not need to own. It's time to get a promotion. Okay, give somebody else the laundry switching job. See how it goes. See how it makes someone else better in their life because you trusted them with something you could have done yourself, but you challenged them to do it instead.

Habit number 10: Prepare a daily win list. Every single day, before you go to bed, you should have a plan for the next day. It might feel like there's a default plan in place: go to work, leave work, take care of kids, make the dinner. There's the default stuff. But I want you to create a list of one to three things, something you would be able to memorize, but you're still going to write down, that if you did them the next day, it would be a major win. The win list is that thing that helps you see why tomorrow is not going to be just another day. Why tomorrow is going to move you forward, forward in a big way in your life. Maybe it's writing that page of the book. Maybe it's just going to the gym for the second day this week. What are the one, two, three things on your win list that you can go to bed the next night and say, "Awesome, this day was a success. I did all of the things that were the bare minimum, the things I would do anyway, but I also made the time for the couple of things that add more meaning and purpose to my life." This video is on my win list today. I haven't filmed a video in a while because I got sick, and it was annoying and blah blah blah winter. I'm out of practice. I need a YouTube video. But sitting here and getting over the hump of, "I haven't filmed in a while, gosh, what am I?" Now I can go to bed tonight and go, "I checked that off my list today. I got that rep in. I can do it again the next day if I want. I feel better. I got over it. I did the thing." Do more things that scratch that itch for you, and that is what sets you apart from so many others who keep just defaulting to the usual tasks of every single day.

Those are the 10 habits that will solve 99% of your problems and completely change your life. If you want to learn how to stop feeling stuck and step into your power, click the link below and I'll see you there.