In the health and wellness world, we're taught that changing our behaviors requires simply being motivated and disciplined enough to change our lifestyles and forcing ourselves to just start to stop engaging in the bad behaviors and start engaging in the good behaviors. 
 
But that's not actually how it works, and one of the biggest reasons why most people can't stick to those lifestyle changes or diets is because, again, that's not how behavior change works. 
 
So today I want to share three really important keys to actually changing behaviors in a way that's going to last.

The first one, the first key is priorities. 
 
It's understanding your priorities in life. 
 
What really matters to you because we prioritize the things that we value and so if you're in a place in your life where you really struggle to prioritize yourself and your well-being in the first place then that's something that you have to work on shifting. 
 
Otherwise you're never going to make lasting changes because your priorities will never be lined up with what you actually want. If your priorities are not in your own well-being, then you're continually going to be stuck in this cycle of not prioritizing doing the things that you need to do for yourself.

The second component is habits and understanding, first of all, understanding your habits. So you have to understand the role that your habits play in, why you're making the choices that you're making in the first place.
 
So instead of trying to force ourselves to stop making the bad choices and start making the good choices, we have to understand the role our habits take in why we make the choices that we make in the first place because most of the time those things are happening completely subconsciously. They're happening on autopilot, mindlessly. 
 
We're not even really aware of them, and when we're not aware of the patterns that were stuck in the habits that were stuck in, where they're coming from, or what purpose they're serving, we can feel really powerless to change them and all the motivation and discipline in the world will never last long term when they're going up against our habits and our conditioning.

And so then the third component that I wanted to talk about is systems or tools, and so these are the things that, the practices that we put in place to help us shift our priorities and to help us shift our habits, our, our thoughts and our beliefs and our habits - the things that drive why we make the choices that we're making in the first place. 

So we have to understand our priorities and we have to start learning how to put ourselves on top of the priority list so that we actually start wanting to take better care of ourselves. That's the first component. 
 
The second one is our habits, right? Our conditioning. We have to start understanding the way that our conditioning is contributing to unhealthy patterns or behaviors, or the behaviors that we want to shift. And we have to learn to create new ones that support the choices we want to make or the life that we want. 
 
And in order to do that, we need the third component, which is systems or tools and these are the practices that we engage in to help us learn how to not only understand our habits but also shift our priorities and shift our habits and begin to create new habits, new patterns, new conditioning that better support what we actually want in the direction that we actually want to go. 
 
So priorities, habits and systems or tools, those are the three main components to change any type of behavior long term. 
 
Do you have any of those components in place?