Grace Over Grind: Create Ease & Convenience, Relieve Stress & Improve Work-Life Balance

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Lately, you've been called or nudged by the Holy Spirit to do something about your work-related stress and extremely long work weeks. It's come upon you almost out of the blue because of how busy you've been. After years of not having any issues, relationship tension, exhaustion, lack of energy, health concerns are pressing on you to do something different.

You realize that you can't continue on the same path with work encompassing all of your time and energy. So at this point, you've realized that instead of stress and overwork having a vague and fuzzy outcome and impact on your life at some point in the future, it's in your face and impacting your life now. So how do you move yourself to that first small action that will have impact on reducing your stress, improving your work-life harmony, and beginning to repair those relationships and restoring your health? This is where I strongly believe that faith-driven tiny habits can help.

People are more likely to act from habit when they're depleted, distracted, or under time pressure. Doesn't that sound like what you're facing on a daily basis is a super busy high achiever in a high-pressure role? Creating habits needs to be focused on ease and convenience, making it easy for new behaviors to become routine and mindless. And don't underestimate their power.

These are like small investments with that long ROI. The small little things that you do and making steady improvements day after day can lead to transformation and give you the life that you want. Let's open in prayer.

Lord, thank you for bringing my dear friends to listen today. May they identify how to take that nudge from Holy Spirit to improve their well-being and move it to action. So much of what occurs in modern lifestyle makes it hard to hear those calls or nudges from God.

Depending on how great the distraction of daily life, it may take some significant circumstances to start recognizing the need to live differently and start taking action. Please help them find the motivation, guidance, strategies, and tactics to reduce stress and improve work-life harmony. You know what is weighing on their heart and in their lives.

Give them the courage and strength to begin to grow and transform their lifestyle and diet, to reclaim time, restore energy, reduce stress, and find more harmony and balance. I pray all is well with every listener, healthy in body, renewed in mind, and strong in spirit. As they reduce stress and improve work-life balance, may they know thy will and your love. In Jesus's name, amen.

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Hello, I'm Sharon McCall with Whispering Fields Wellness. Today in Grace Over Grind, I'm going to end up doing a recap of faith-driven habit model, the impact of environment on building effective habits.

Habits just are so much easier to adopt when they're easier and convenient. For example, so many people work from habits. Did you realize that people make over 200 food-based decisions per day, yet recall only 15? Because so many of them are based on habit, not on willful decision.

Test yourself. What food-related choices do you remember making an actual decision on in the last 24 hours? And decision fatigue and the limits of self-will are very real. So when you're trying to make changes in your life, you don't want to end up making them hard or really make it so that you're constantly having to focus on doing the right thing.

You want to make them easy, convenient, obvious for you to being able to move forward. So as an example of this, when you're on a diet, how many times can you walk past that box of donuts before you grab one? And that's why I don't recommend making huge changes when you're faced with significant things happening in your life, when you're living a life of chronic stress and constant overwork. Small, tiny changes will allow you to win the marathon.

You will end up getting exhausted if you sprint and try and do this all at once. You want to make sure that you have effective habit building by making desired choices easier and more convenient and obvious until they can become routine. Faith-driven tiny habits are perfect when you want to make changes, but lack the time or energy for big changes.

They're small and incremental over time and build momentum. As you take a look at your investment strategy, if you put away a dollar a day into a steady investment, it has dividends over time. And that's just like tiny habits.

By doing the small right thing and continuing to focus on adding to that and expanding that, you will have the transformation that you desire. Also, if you choose to do faith-driven tiny habits as opposed to more secular ones, as you lean into your faith, God meets you part way. And this can be done for all types of changes, because when you're focusing on God and your Christian identity is why you want to change and the desired outcome is to be closer to God as part of your plan, He will meet you part way.

And this approach can work whether you're working on spiritual growth, social, improving your relationships, emotional, intellectual, physical, environmental wellness. In a few weeks we'll go over financial and occupational. All the things we've talked about in the wellness toolbox topic so far are applicable for tiny habits.

So just to kind of run over the model really quick, I know it's been a while since I talked about the model in its entirety. So that first step is recognizing God's plan for you. It's all about building habits based upon how you want to grow your Christian identity and the vision God has given you of what thriving and flourishing means to you.

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And this is an identity-focused change approach, which even scientists agree is more effective than outcome-based ones. You don't just want a long list of all the things that you want. You want to focus on who you will be, and as a result of being, these are the things that you do, because that's what people like that do.

So when you say that you're a non-smoker, it never crosses your mind to even have that cigarette, versus I'm trying to quit. It means you're open to that possibility. So that's the distinction between identity and outcome-focused changes.

So then the next phase is examining and testing your ways. It's all about comparing your current thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to the ones that you aspire to be based upon your identity statement and your vision of work-life harmony. What's supporting you? What's not? What's at odds? Going through and identifying where changes need to happen in your life.

So in this part is where we structure and build and design tiny habits, and this is based on the ABC model. So it's an anchor, a behavior, the smallest possible behavior you can come up with, and the celebrate. And the celebrate is really important because you got to do it before the action to remind you, during to reinforce, and afterwards to reward yourself.

This ensures that this new behavior becomes something so desirable, it is easier, and the preferred option for you to do is you as the behavioral choice. And this is where you can spend a lot of time designing your habits, changing your environment, so that you can create that ease, that convenience, so it's obvious, so it's the most desirable option for you. And you can design this all up front, or you can build it in in the couple of steps as you're working on continuous improvement.

So the next phase is to act in his will to do what is required, and this is in the implementation of the change. Once you've designed your change, it's about putting it into action into your life, then monitoring it and adapting, seeing what sticks, what's working. Do you need to reinforce any of the steps or any of the elements in the design, so that the next time that you can more successfully achieve that? And then once you've sustained for a week the new behavior, and see that it's starting to become a regular part of your routine, then you can go into the next phase, which is persevere and grow, which is to train and iterate, continuing to grow that behavior with the next smallest action, and just repeating through the cycle.

In time, you're transformed by God's power, and to walk by the Spirit. Take a look at John 15.4.5 if you need a little bit of inspiration. You will have less stress and more time at home for yourself and your loved ones as you continue this process, and apply it in more areas of your life.

If you haven't downloaded the guide before, it's super easy to get started. It only takes minutes. It's set up as Mad Libs style, as a Mad Libs style worksheet, so you just fill in the blank as you go along.

It will not take you more than five minutes to get started if this is something you want to give a try to. I'm not doing a formal exercise today. We're just going to go over several ideas on how you can design and build more effective habits.

You can design these into your habits, or use these as small adjustments to help making habits easier and more convenient for you as you're in those last two steps. So remember the four of them. It's the R-E-A-P, so when you act in His will and persevere, those last two steps that I'm talking about.

These steps and this approach is all about overcoming any inertia or obstacles that are holding you back from being successful as you continue to train and iterate, and as you implement these behaviors in your life and turn them into habits and routines. So the first of the items that we're going to cover today is environmental cues. To effectively make changes, you really need to simplify, and you can do this in changing your environment.

Thinking about how do you make things the easiest to access. So let's, I started talking about food earlier, so I'll just continue on food. So as you think about when it's the middle of the day, and you're really hungry, and the first thing you, there's nothing in your office to grab.

So you go to the vending machine, and you pick something from the vending machine, because it's the closest and simplest food that you'll be able to get. So the easiest to access at this point in time is the vending machine. If you want to change your habits so that you're eating something that's better for you, or at least a little bit healthier, or something more convenient even, start a snack drawer or a mini fridge.

So you want to make it so that it's easy to access, and that it's super convenient for you when you're depleted, distracted, under time pressure. So because particularly when food is being just consumed as fuel to prevent you from just toppling over in exhaustion, it's not truly being enjoyed. So you want to make sure that you're making it easy and convenient.

And then while you're doing that, you just want to make sure that you set up the right choices for you. So let's say you're doing the snack drawer. What's the assortment, the quantity, the pack size that you want? Because if you get a really big package of M&Ms, I guarantee you as soon as you open those and you put those on your desk, they're going to be gone before you even realize it, because you're just going to be like eating through the course of the day.

But if you want to being able to enjoy a treat of M&Ms or trail mix or whatever, getting down to that individual portion size ensures that even if you're automatically eating, you're eating that right quantity and not getting into that stress eating and that mindless eating that you might be wanting to avoid. So the other thing too from an environmental cue standpoint is reinforcement. So is there a way that you can do what's called temptation bundling, where you're pairing an action that you want with an action that you need? So if you want to start exercising, so getting up and getting yourself that first cup of coffee, maybe you need to figure out how to put some exercising in between.

Maybe you put your exercise clothes out instead of your work clothes, put your sneakers there. So at least you're starting the process of doing some jogging up the hallway a little bit before you have that first cup of coffee. Whatever it is, you want to figure out what that right bundling is and then create that in your environment.

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Another way is a vice-virtue combination. So if you know, and you're going back to the snack drawer, if you know you're going to end up putting that individual package of M&Ms, well balance it. Put in some apples and other things that are better for you choices to make it so that you've got some options for you and it's just that right combination.

And you really do want to eliminate the self-control factor because you are so stressed and exhausted. You want whatever is easy and convenient. So set yourself up.

Personally, I'm a dried fruit and nut person, yet there are so many times when I'd have like that chocolate craving and I'd go and send the admin off to go and find me some chocolate of whatever type because I didn't like what was in the vending machine. So to get away from that, because that was actually leading into like smoothies and all sorts of like high calorie shakes and things. So I just kept some Ghirardelli squares in my stash or some mini candy bars just so I could get that right combination, that right self-control.

So I wasn't eating the big old mondo thing that she picked up from the service station around the corner. And you can do this with any kind of change. So let's say you want to drink more water.

So how do you put the water pitcher closer than the coffee pot or the soda machine? If you want to being able to do more Bible reading, what's the most convenient location for you to put your Bible? There's one story where somebody, she put it literally on the toilet for first thing in the morning. She'd gotten a special Bible that she just kept there, but it didn't ensure that when she went to use it first thing in the morning, she read. Different strokes, different folks.

So if that's your thing, go ahead. I'm more of a Bible on the pillow or right where I put my phone to charge it so that as I put the phone down, I grab the Bible. You can use your charger as a boundary.

So if you move your charger to a different area, so it makes it so that it's not as easy to access. It's less convenient. Maybe you're going to be less likely to go and access it once you put it on there.

So if you get in the habit of putting your phone on the charger in another room, and then you have your evening in the family room or living room, you're less likely to go and go check that phone because it's not convenient and it's not easy. Anything you can do that can add resistance or remove it depending on whether it's a desirable habit that you want to encourage or something you want to discourage. Other examples of environmental cues are particularly around being able to remember to do the action or your rewards.

Place those in the right locations. Post-it notes to remind you on the mirror if you're trying to do something for self-care in the restroom. Post-it note on the fridge if you want to make sure that you're getting your supplements or starting to take your lunch to work and to make sure you're taking it out of the fridge.

Can't tell you the number of times I forgot to take my lunch out of the fridge after I went through the effort of making it the night before and then get to work and realize I have nothing. So you never know until you're in the middle of all of this what environmental cues will be the most helpful for you to ensure that you are progressing with your habits in the way that you want. Moving into the next topic in regards to the environment.

The environment can be an anchor. So many of our routines we think about as being time-based, just like your first thing in the morning, last thing at night, just before you leave work. You could end up setting something up as a little habit routine. Anytime you enter or leave a space. So there was someone that I'd read about. He called himself proactively lazy.

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He set up his environment and he kept it organized. Every time that he exited the space, he would clean it up and then make sure it was perfect for when he came back in. For a lot of us that are time pressured, I just, the organization thing is really tough.

It really is. But the, because you're always going from one task immediately into the next one. There's usually not time to kind of organize yourself before you leave that space.

So I totally get it if you're like me in that. And it took though, it helped anytime I re-entered my space, catch my breath, calm my thoughts, focus on my top priority as I'm organizing my desk to be focused on what's next. Because there are plenty of times it was like in complete disarray as I finished up one thing I grabbed for a meeting that I realized it was suddenly time for me to shoot off to the conference room for.

And then I didn't need any of the stuff that was here for, that I'd been prepping with and I could clear it and get on to the next item. And it was a great way for me to just shift gears every time I re-entered into my office to make sure that I reset it for the next phase of activity. So another idea in regards to how to use environment as an anchor is behavioral geofencing.

So you make identified behaviors acceptable based upon a location. A lot of people use this as they're starting to work on alternatives to diet, like controlling where do they eat ice cream or special treats or what times of the day so that they stop eating in the bedroom or eating while they're watching TV and just kind of narrow it down to whatever it is that they want to do. So behavioral geofencing is fairly common for those types of changes.

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But it also works when you're trying to reduce your workload. So let's start with the example of you want to work fewer hours in the evening. So maybe what your plan is is in week one you just say you're not taking the phone to dinner.

So whenever you walk into the dining room you can't have your phone. So it's kind of like the example that we did a couple weeks ago where the guy left his cell phone on the couch and dropped it as he was going to dinner so he could enjoy more family time with dinner. Then once that became habit, week two could end up being no devices in the dining room or in the living room for dinner, meaning you now need to go put it on a charger someplace so it's not just dropping it on the couch.

Then you could progress to, okay, no devices in the dining room or living room from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Kind of see how we're slowly building this up including time and location. So the next week could end up being no devices in the dining room, the living rooms from 6 p.m. to bedtime. Then you could go all the way up to a dining room, living room, bedroom from 6 p.m. to bedtime.

So just kind of depending on what you want to accomplish, you design that habit and that progression as you persevere and grow as you iterate this process with each week in terms of how you're changing what that core behavior is. You just keep tweaking it as you go and there's so many different ways that you could take this approach. Maybe you just start with your laptop or maybe and then you go to the cell phone on the laptop.

So it's all about what makes sense to you. What would be effective for you as a deterrent to work in the evenings, to set those boundaries that you can maintain and have success with instead of just saying, oh, I ain't gonna work in the evening anymore and then slowly find all the reasons why you still need to. Start with something reasonable and then work your way up to what it is that you truly desire.

And by making it so small and so painless, you will be successful. And because you have that momentum of successful change, it'll be able to continue to allow you to iterate that 1% better every day. And whenever you get stuck, God's there.

He's there. Your chief spiritual officer is there to guide you and to get you that next step, that next direction. So another way to use the environment to being able to ensure things are easy and convenient or not if you're trying to avoid something is blockers and lockers.

Technology is great these days. So maybe some of your productivity losses that lead you to take work home is distraction. It's so easy to get distracted in the work environment.

You have stuff coming at you all the time. And so one of the things that you might want to do is being able to use app blockers, do not disturb mode, turn off your notifications, silence, so you can get more focus work done and get less distracted by all the stuff that's coming in. Maybe you want to end up putting your phone in a timed lockbox even so literally you can't get to it.

So it's just based upon the time where it's being able to make it so that you can open it and get to it. Whatever it is, because sometimes that silent mode, I know, it still doesn't stop that habit of let me look, let me look. When it's in a time lockbox, you literally can't look until the timer is up.

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There's one example I ended up hearing about. I have not heard anybody yet that's brave enough to try this, but I keep throwing it out there just in case if it inspires other people. He ended up having his admin reset his social media passwords every Monday and make sure he didn't know them, and then he would get the passwords on Friday as he left work.

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This meant that Monday through Friday, zero social media. Couldn't look at any of the stuff that would distract him, and then he could do whatever he wanted on the weekend with the social media and then come back into work and can't access it again because of this procedure that he set up. You can also set this up though if you with the same approach to have it so that it changes your work password so you can't work the weekend.

Thought? I'm sure that you've got somebody in your family that would love to being able to help you with that. Even if you don't have an admin, I'm sure you can get somebody to help hold the keys to your passwords and block you out so you can't do what you don't want to do. Those are just a series of different ideas on how you can use the environment and different tools to being able to make habits easier, more convenient, so that they're preferable to whatever it is that you don't want to do.

And if you want to increase the resistance to something that you don't want to do, you can use the same approaches. It's just the opposite. Make it harder.

You want to increase the difficulty to do the things that you no longer want to do. So it's all about that balance because intrinsically, humans want to do whatever is easiest for them. And the more exhausted we are, the more distracted we are, the more we're going to go for the easiest and most convenient choice.

If you have any questions, do reach out to Sharon@whisperingfieldswellness.com. I welcome any discussion on these. I'm also available in the Facebook group as well if you'd like to end up bringing the discussion there. In closing, I hope this gives you plenty of ideas on improving your habit building and creating the changes you want in your life.

I know you want less stress and more work-life balance. So hopefully this gives you some great ideas to proceed. Today I reviewed the summary of the benefits, or the challenges, of habits to reduce decisions and make things more automatic.

A quick review of faith-driven tiny habits and how you can change the environment to make your new habit more effective. Stop feeling like you're making no progress on reducing stress and improving work-life balance on your own. God wants you to thrive and flourish as you fulfill his plan for you.

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As you take these teeny tiny steps to grow closer to him and start displacing work as an idol in your life, he will help you. When you are weak and have difficulty doing what is right, he can help you get through the situation if you let him. Whether you are using this approach to make changes in physical and mental health to restore energy and improve resilience, to create calming routines that reduce stress, or to reclaim time or change your work habits so you can have work-life harmony, this is a simple, practical, and easy approach that works when you feel like there is no time for anything else in your day.

Click the link to download my worksheet on building tiny habits. You can effectively make change in your life with seconds a day. You can get started on this in five minutes or less.

It is that simple, I promise. If you've been working with this worksheet for a while and watching the videos, if you want to work with me so you can put these stress recovery tools together better and go deeper, click the services link below. As a Christian stress recovery coach, I'm here to help you explore more of what underlies your stress and imbalance, to ensure that you have the motivation and accountability to make the changes that you desire in your life.

I can come alongside to support and encourage you and share a few strategies and tools to help you with mindset, lifestyle, and diet changes. See you next episode. Have a blessed day.