Keystone Habit #1

In order to truly dominate your DadBod, you must become a cultivator of your habits. At any given time, you should have at least one meaningful positive habit that you are working to instill. You should start with these two. Once those are ingrained, there are a limited number of habits that I strongly encourage you to develop, no matter what form your DadBod may take. I call these Keystone Habits.

Keystone Habit #1: Develop a Gratitude Ritual

Tony Robbins makes the powerful insight that it is impossible to be grateful and angry simultaneously or grateful and scared simultaneously. If you develop the habit of reflecting upon the things in your life you are thankful for, you will find a dramatic uptick in your sense of well-being and your ability to control your emotional state.

I’m a huge fan of the 5 Minute Journal and the approach I recommend below is a slightly modified version of their method. 100% of the thinking behind this comes from them.

Level 1 takes two minutes/day. Level 2 takes four minutes/day. Level 3 takes five minutes/day.

Level 1:  End each day by writing down the three best things that happened that day. This teaches you to be more fully present in the moment and reflect upon all the awesome shit that went down. Reviewing several months worth of these notes is tremendously life-affirming and will break you out of a bad mood instantaneously. One of my favorite traditions is going through a year's worth on New Year's Eve.

Level 2:  Level 1 + start each day by writing down three things you are grateful for. This primes your state and reduces anxiety. These can be big things like your health or your family, medium things like your favorite author, or little things like having a better than average night’s sleep the night before.

Level 3:  Level 2 + end each day by writing one thing you could have done to make the day even better. This is incredibly valuable data that will teach you where you need to pay more attention. There will almost certainly be key themes and categories that emerge over time. Being the data nerd that I am, you can bet your bottom dollar that I have a dynamic excel spreadsheet with this information sub-categorized so I can see which DadBod is slowly sneaking up on me and stop it in its tracks (got my eyes on you, Parental DadBod). 

It’s critical that you physically write this information down in a notebook. Simply thinking about the things you are grateful for is nice but the impact will be much greater if you put pen to paper. Also, without writing things down, you lose the opportunity to review past entries.

840 days of journals full of 2,520 amazing things that happened, 2,520 things I'm grateful for, and 840 ways to get better.

The final level of this habit is sharing your gratitude with the people who are important to you. This is both more difficult and more valuable than the approach outlined above. Start with making a daily practice of writing it down and then see how far it takes you.