88: Should You Stop Joining Challenges and Bootcamps? with Monica Reinagel

Have you ever signed up for a challenge or bootcamp? Whether it’s to improve your health, or start a new habit, or even to learn some new productivity strategies (I run a productivity boot camp in our community)… you go through the boot camp, learn a ton, and feel super motivated to keep going…

… but that motivation doesn’t always last. And a month later you’re back in your old habits. Don’t worry my friend, you’re not alone!

New Year’s Resolution season is coming up so it’s the perfect time to be joined on the show by licenced nutritionist and host of The Change Academy podcast Monica Reinagel.

Monica’s here to share why it’s easy to lose motivation with our goals, and how to take all that success you learn in a boot camp or challenge and keep it going over the long term.

More About Monica

Monica’s training is in nutrition. Her goal when she started her career was to give folks better information about nutrition so they could make better choices about food.

But over time Monica saw that information wasn’t the primary problem.

The bigger problem was how to get people to put that information into practice. We all know what we should eat for breakfast, but eating oatmeal when the delicious box of Coco Puffs are staring at you is tough!

Monica’s focus evolved to answer that question. She wanted to find out more about why we do what we do, how can we motivate ourselves, and most importantly, how can we create lasting behaviour change?

Everyone knows what they need to do when it comes to fueling our bodies and minds, but it’s a lot harder to follow through.

Why We Lose Motivation After Boot Camps.

It’s not all bad… Bootcamps can be a really good way to get motivated to get started. An added bonus is doing it in a group with other people to hold you accountable.

The problem is that they rarely seem to lead to lasting behavioural change according to Monica.

Monica has an explanation for why this happens: Habits take time to change

Usually challenges are 30-days, so it’s easy to think that by the time you reach the end of the challenge, you’ll have this habit forever! But, there’s more to creating a lasting habit than repeating a behaviour for 30 days.

Another problem is that it can be a tough transition from learning in a group setting with others to keeping that momentum when no one’s looking.

The answer? Monica says to use your time in the challenge effectively by asking yourself: “What will this look like in real life, when the challenge is over? What does day 31 look like?”.

All too often we get to the end of a challenge, do a happy dance because we made it, and then within a couple of days or weeks it’s like it never happened, those habits are unlearned, and we’re back at square one.

A New Way Of Thinking: Change Your Identity to Change Your Behavior.

In order to make lasting changes to our behaviour, there’s a degree to which we start to think of ourselves in a different way.

Not just someone who participates in the challenge, but seeing yourself as someone who does eat healthy and who does exercise.

Seeing yourself in this new way can also hold you over for the days that don’t go so well. It can be the reason you don’t rattle your identity on the day that you skipped the gym, because you know that you’re still that person who goes to the gym, and you’ll go tomorrow instead.

There’s also a sense of absolutism in challenges. You’re either all in or you’re all out. You either make it to the end of the challenge or you failed. This doesn’t build the kind of flexibility that you need in real life.

For example: Practicing a behaviour in order to lose weight means there’s an endpoint. When you reach that magic number, then what?

When all that motivation you had to reach that goal weight disappears because you’ve made it, how do you keep motivation to continue to make good choices to keep the weight off?

Re-framing your goal as “I’m making these choices because I’m someone who values exercise” instead of “I want to weight this amount” can help create lasting behaviour change.

With no finish line built in, your new habits and motivation can be carried through to an ongoing state.

A goal would be to run a marathon, but an objective would be leading a healthy lifestyle.

As exciting as it is to make progress towards your goal, it can be paired with a sense of apprehension of actually finishing it, which can result I undermining yourself, so as to avoid that unknown of what comes next.

Shifting from goals to objectives can help you maintain those new habits long term.

The Dark Side of Challenges & Bootcamps

Monica says there’s an attraction to the idea of a clean slate.

There’s a sense that when you start a new bootcamp, cleanse, detox, or challenge, that you’ll have the ability to leave everything that happened before behind, and step into a fresh new start and wipe the slate clean.

Usually when you sign up for these challenges it’s because things have been going badly, and you want to restart so you need to do something dramatic to clear what came before out of your history.

The catch is, you don’t take the opportunity to reflect and understand the factors that led you to that point.

Before turning away so quickly from failure, instead spending time being compassionate and curious about what happened to make things go wrong, you can learn so many resources for the next time that things aren’t going your way.

If you don’t yourself the opportunity to learn, your brain will continue to fall back into those bad habits out of default.

Instead of asking yourself what do I need to do to make it to the end of these 30 days, ask yourself what you need to do to make that habit your new default.

What would the imperfect version of this challenge look like?

Another mental trap with challenges according to Monica is the “all or nothing” mindset.

Either I reach my goal in this challenge or I’m a failure. I go all in or it’s not worth it. If I don’t hit all of my goals I’ve lost...

But that’s not sustainable.

Instead, ask yourself “what would the B- version of this look like?”. That’s the version that you could actually sustain that would be good enough to get you to your bigger goals and objectives.

We can’t all live A+ lives all the time! B- can be good enough. And done is better than perfect.

If A+ is the goal all the time, anything below it feels like a failure (even an A or A-) and that can be super discouraging and quickly burn you out.

Setting more achievable and realistic goals helps our brains stay on track for the long term.

Monica’s Book Recommendation

During COVID, Monica joined a book club. Her favourite from the 15 books that they read was Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller. It’s part history, part science, part romance. It will teach you a lot!

Want to Learn More?

You can find Monica on The Change Academy podcast to learn about creating sustainable change at www.changeacademypodcast.com

You can also download The Lab Notebook that you can use as a study guide to work through the 8 things that are necessary to create change. Grab our free copy at: www.changeacademypodcast.com/notebook

Show Highlights

[02:29] Learn more about Monica and why she started working in nutrition and fitness.

[05:21] What are some of the problems when it comes to challenges and bootcamps?

[11:14] Monica shares a concrete example of identity and behavior change.

[15:22] What happens when you reach your “life” goal at an early age?

[18:13] Another aspect of challenges that are actually part of their dark side.

[23:05] Questions you should ask yourself as you go through a challenge or bootcamp.

[26:36] A quick summation of how to approach challenges for success.

[27:39] What book would Monica recommend to me if we were best friends?

[28:55] Connect with Monica.

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