How to Create Healthy Habits and Boundaries for Your Goals

You’re a dreamer.

You have big goals and an even bigger vision for the world you want to create.

You’re on the path to living your purpose, and you know what you need to do to get there.

You set strong, ambitious goals year after year.

You start the year off strong, motivated by your big goals, but a few months in, you start to slow down.

You don’t feel inspired to reach your goal.

Maybe you made some missteps along the way. Maybe it’s harder than you thought it would be.

Maybe your friends and family are distracting you or telling you to stop.

Maybe it’s just not meant to be.

Or maybe, you need a new routine.

You need a constant in your life. Something to keep you motivated and inspired on your journey toward living your purpose and achieving your goals.

When the prayers, affirmations, and manifesting stop working, it’s time for a new strategy.

It’s time for a new habit.

Habits are small actions or steps you repeat so often, you no longer think about them.

You might have habits like brushing your teeth, exercising, meditating, checking social media, calling a friend on a walk.

But have you built a habit around your most important and ambitious goals?

Have you built a habit to set you up for success?

If not, that might be exactly what you need to stick with and achieve your goal this year.

Here Here’s how to create healthy habits and boundaries for your goals:

Shift your mindset

Let’s start with mindset.

Mindsets are beliefs—beliefs about ourselves and our most basic qualities, like intelligence, talents and personality.

If you believe that you’re born with a certain amount of intelligence, talent, or personality traits, then you might have a fixed mindset. In a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, can’t be changed. They are who they are, and that’s it.

In terms of achieving your goals, if you have a fixed mindset, you might believe that you only have so much energy, or you aren’t good at certain tasks, or you don’t have the education, experience, or knowledge you need to succeed.

This mindset keeps us in a state of low confidence. Think about it – if you worry that you’re not good enough or not smart enough, you’re living in a fixed mindset. Now, this doesn’t mean that you live your entire life with this mindset, but you believe that your talents in a specific area (like your career or achieving success) are fixed.

So what happens? You give up. You give up on trying something you might eventually be good at. You give up on launching your website or writing weekly blogs or applying for the job that’s just out of reach. You give up on even the small things, like starting a journaling or meditation practice or taking a walk outside.

And all of this giving up takes a toll on your mindset. By not taking small steps toward your goal, you’ve reinforced the belief that you’re not good at it or you’ll never achieve it. So you continue to avoid it. And the vicious cycle continues.

Your mindset has a lot to do with your success in life. It can add to your sense of confidence or take away from it.

The cure for a fixed mindset is a growth mindset. In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work— brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience essential for great accomplishment.

If you have a growth mindset, you believe that your talents and skills can be honed over time – through practice, learning from others or asking for help. So, whether you are “good” or “bad” at a certain task or skill comes down to your mindset. If you shift to a growth mindset, you know that being “good” at achieving your goals is the result of consistent practice and effort.

And, if you have a growth mindset, you’ll look for other ways to improve. You might hire a business coach for one-on-one support. You might join a mastermind or class with others you can learn from. You might reach out to a friend and ask her to be your accountability partner. Because you believe that skill is only one piece of the puzzle, you’ll work hard and do whatever it takes to reach your goal. You’ll keep trying until you find something that aligns with your skill level, or you’ll create something that gives you meaning and purpose.  

Related: How to Shift from a Scarcity Mindset to an Abundance Mindset

Change your identity

The key to success is identifying with the new behavior you’re trying to achieve. For example, if you set goals around your health and physical fitness, you might identify as someone who enjoys exercise, or someone who strives to be strong and healthy. Or, if your goals are centered around starting your own business, you might identify as determined, entrepreneurial, or ambitious.

If you’re looking to change a habit or start a new one in pursuit of a new goal you set, you’ll also need to change your identity. This was where I got stuck every time I tried to follow through with my exercise habit. I realized that my identity was, “I hate exercise.” If that was my fixed mindset, it’s no surprise that my efforts fell through every time.

Once I realized this, I made a conscious effort to think differently about this habit I was trying to build. Instead of identifying with someone who hated exercise, I created affirmations for my new identity, like “I feel happy and energized after a great workout,” or “I am strong and capable.” I wrote it on a sticky note and put it on my bathroom mirror to reinforce the beliefs.

Think about how you identify with your goal. Is it aligned with what you want to achieve? If it’s not, consciously create new beliefs or affirmations to help you identify with the person you need to become to achieve your goals. Write your affirmations next to your goals and read them every day. Better yet, create a vision board to help you see your goals come to life.

Make your goal a habit

You will never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.  — John C. Maxwell

Habits are the small decisions you make and actions you perform every day. It’s a choice that you deliberately made at some point, and then stopped thinking about, but continue doing, often every day. According to researchers at Duke University, habits account for about 40 percent of our behaviors on any given day. 

Habits are often learned and therefore, can be changed. It’s important to build good habits because these are our subconscious actions, emotions and behaviors. And since most of our actions stem from this subconscious activity, habits are important for achieving your goals and living in alignment with your purpose.

Most people approach habits from a place of willpower. Willpower is like a muscle, meaning its energy is finite and can be easily drained. We each have a “fuel tank” of willpower that can be spent, and once we use it all up, we are far more prone to give up and indulge in our whims, impulses, and desires.

This is why after a long day at work, all we want to do is sit on the couch and binge watch the latest Netflix craze. Or why after a week of struggling with a new meditation practice, we can convince ourselves that skipping a day (or two) isn’t a big deal.

But because willpower is like a muscle, it can be exercised and practiced and built up. Just like going to the gym and building up strength and endurance, you can build up your discipline and willpower over a long period of time by setting and accomplishing a series of tasks on a consistent basis.

Self-discipline is nothing but a series of healthy habits. It’s easy to make the right decisions based on willpower for one hour or one day or one week, but eventually we run out of decision-making energy and cave in to our old patterns and behaviors.

Achieving your most important and ambitious goals relies on more than willpower. If you want to achieve something you’ve never achieved before, that means integrating the appropriate habits into your daily life. It’s not about forcing yourself to wake up an hour earlier each day as much as finding a way to actually look forward to it and enjoy that extra time to yourself.

Create healthy habits

Habit Stacking is a way to build a new habit into your life by stacking it on top of something you’re currently doing. For example, before you brush your teeth in the morning (current habit), you can meditate (new habit) for three minutes. 

This is the quickest way to add a new habit in your life. Because the current habit is strongly wired into your brain already, you can add a new habit into this fast and efficient network of neurons more quickly than if you tried to build a new path from scratch.

You can use this concept to stack a new routine onto something you’re already doing. Again, the reason habit stacking works so well is that your current habits are already built into your brain. You have patterns and behaviors that have been strengthened over weeks, months, or even years. By linking your new habits to a cycle that is already built into your brain, you make it more likely that you'll stick to the new behavior.

So think about the areas in your life where a new habit might fit in, in relation to your goals. What are some of the habits you already do in those areas?

Maybe you already have a morning routine where you spend time reading or journaling, and you can easily tack on another 20 or 30 minutes for exercise. Perhaps you have a habit of working on your side hustle for an hour after work, and your goal is to get a new certification. You might decide to use part of that time to review the coursework from that week’s lesson, then incorporate it into a blog or other resource for your website.

Once you’ve determined your current habit, complete this sentence: after/before my current habit, I will add my new habit. So, “after I read this chapter, I will write for 20 minutes.” Or, “After I complete this lesson, I will work on my PowerPoint slides.” See how it works?

Set healthy boundaries

Now that you’ve identified your goal, found a new identity, and determined the habits that will help you achieve your goal over time, you need to set healthy boundaries to protect your time and energy.

Let’s get real: there are only so many hours in a day, especially if you’re working full time and trying to start a side hustle or other business. You likely have competing priorities in the form of work tasks, family needs, personal commitments, or social events.

It’s easy for your new habit to be put on the back burner or at the bottom of your priority list because it’s not ingrained or integrated into your daily routine. This is where boundaries come in.

Boundaries are important for staying focused on and aligned with your goals. Without boundaries, you’re more likely to waiver on your new habit when something else comes up.

To set healthy boundaries, first consider the time you need to spend on your new habit. If it’s a morning routine, do you need to wake up earlier? If you’re building your website, how much time will that take each day? If you’re starting a new meditation or exercise routine, how much time will you spend on those activities? Determine the time you’ll need, then create a plan for your habit.

Next, consider the impacts on the people around you. If you decide to wake up an hour earlier each day to write your book, will that impact your partner’s/roommate’s/kids’ schedule? Will you have to stop to take your dog out, or can you delegate that task to someone else? If you live with others, let them know about your plans and set a boundary around your sacred time.

Finally, consider your energy. When your willpower is low, you’re more likely to skip your new habit and fall back into your old ones. When are you at your most creative/energized/inspired? When do you feel unmotivated? Create a boundary for yourself by reminding yourself of your goal – your why. Why did you start this new habit? What will it allow you to achieve? When you start to falter, can you come back to the reason you started? What else might you need to support your new habit?

Setting these boundaries sets the foundation for your success in achieving your most important goals.

Related: How to Protect Your Energy After a Stressful Week

The Takeaway

Achieving your most important goals, especially around your life purpose, comes down to your mindset and habits. Willpower will only take you so far. That’s why developing healthy habits and boundaries is so important for your current and future success.

Habit stacking, adding new habits to current habits, helps you build that willpower muscle without even thinking about it. You’ll make more progress toward your goals because you’re choosing to overcome your fixed mindset. Because you’ve built a habit, it takes the pressure off deciding whether or not you feel up to achieving your goals.

How can you use habit stacking to add a healthy habit to your daily routine? Let me know in the comments!

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