“The great disconnect between what we say we believe and how we really live causes most of the stress and discouragement in our lives.”
– Rick Warren

No matter what your product, service or message may be, your lifestyle represents your message to all that you encounter from day to day. The first thing we have to do is become our own best customer. By that I mean that we have to really be committed to using our product or service.
If you own a Ford dealership, you don’t drive a Chevy to work. Becoming your own best customer and doing it as publicly as possible is your very best marketing. Most companies have great products or services. We just need to show how great they are by showing how much they affect our lives in a positive way. When that happens, we become a magnet. We begin to attract people because they see our experience and want a similar experience.
Besides the obvious marketing aspect of practicing what you preach, there is a lot to say for living a life that is congruent with your core values. This state of integrity creates happiness and inner peace.

Many people live a life that is not congruent with their values and what they find important. Some say that their health is important but don’t always eat right and exercise as much as they know they should. Some people say that their family deserves top priority but many times, the urgent demands of work and other areas of their life take precedence. They may feel stuck in their situation and are not content. Yet they continue with this life. Sometimes because they are not aware why they have a feeling of lack of fulfillment. Sometimes they stay stuck because they don’t know how to change their life.

When you live with integrity, you inspire, influence and motivate others with your words and with your actions too. Others see the positive example that you are and attempt to emulate you. Successful people live with integrity. They say what they do and they do what they say. They are trusted by those whom they interact with and they build healthy relationships. These relationships then help them to achieve bigger and better things.

“How you do anything is how you do everything.” Learning how to LIVE your walk is extremely important in not only keeping integrity with yourself but in the site of others. Integrity of truly living within what you preach is vital to your inner compass. If you are out of alignment with your lifestyle it will take you off course.

Alisa recounts a period of her life when she was living extremely outside of integrity in her lifestyle. “It was about 2009 and I was dealing with a lot of low energy days. One of my staff introduced me to a way to drink coffee without the nasty coffee taste. I met my new friend, the Starbucks Double Caramel Mocha Frappuccino. I began to live a lifestyle of skipping breakfast and drinking this amazing creation instead. Pretty soon the double turned into a triple. Within a year I had developed slow adjustments in my previous healthier nutrition choices to skipping lunch and just having another triple tall caramel mocha. From there, more subtle changes occurred. Instead of snacking on nuts and fruit I found myself either skipping meals or grabbing some hard candy or Lemonheads.

After nearly four years I barely ate any food and found myself 70 lbs overweight. It was in this time of my life I learned how important living your lifestyle daily with habits that increase your lifestyle rather than slow subtle negative choices that take your life away.

When we started the Project 10 Challenge from ViSalus, our objective was our own health transformation. We had both slipped into a ‘less than healthy’ lifestyle. We were not looking for another business at that time. We started our challenge and within a couple of weeks, people around us began to take notice. Many wanted to know what we were doing to have such a turnaround in energy and weight loss. Our results were our best advertising and more people joined us to begin their own health transformation. We started small group workouts and began posting health and fitness tips on Facebook and Twitter. Our lifestyle was becoming our proof of concept.

As more and more people joined our team, we continued to apply the skills and knowledge that we had accumulated over the years and we advanced in rank and income. As our adventure continued and our resources increased, our lifestyle was congruent with becoming leaders in the direct selling industry. And we documented it all as publicly as we could.”
Making Lifestyle Changes Easier
More than 90% of people will tell you that they do not enjoy change. Change is not easy because we are creatures of habit. We want to continue living in a certain routine once we have conditioned our body and mind to function in that way. This makes us feel comfortable with our surroundings and decisions. That’s why it’s called the ‘Comfort Zone’
Even if you don’t like change, there are ways to make healthy lifestyle changes easier. There are also tools you can use to welcome change into your life, even when you’re entering new uncharted territory.
Here are three ways to make lifestyle changes easier for you:
1. Determine Pros and Cons. If you know you need to make changes in your life and you aren’t looking forward to doing so, you can do a simple exercise that will make the change easier to handle.
Take a sheet of paper, and on one side write “Pros,” and on the other write, “Cons.” On the corresponding side you will write the pros and the cons of the change so you can see what the benefits and drawbacks might be.
You may realize as you complete this exercise that the very thing holding you back is the fear of change itself.
Seeing the pros and cons will help you realize how it will benefit you to make the change. This allows you to warm up to the thought that change might actually be a good idea!
2) Incorporate the Change Gradually. Another way to make lifestyle changes easier is to work up to them.
For instance, if the healthy lifestyle changes that you need to make center around ceasing your habit of smoking and drinking you may not want to quit cold turkey; instead, you can work up to it. Stop drinking every night with dinner, and then stop drinking for a few days at a time. You can do the same thing with smoking so that you are not fighting the lifestyle change.
Preparing yourself both physically and mentally helps you to ease the change into your daily routine.
3) Use Affirmations. Another way to help make lifestyle changes easier is to use positive affirmations. Positive affirmations are statements that encapsulate the way you would ideally think or behave.
You can either create your own affirmations or look for statements that others have created. The key is that you find an affirmation that speaks to you.
Words are powerful and, when you repeat the same words over time, they continue to resonate through your mind. When the words are positive, you’ll find that you can tap into the positive thought anytime or anywhere.
If you are worried about making a healthy lifestyle change, you don’t have to be. Instead, you can remind yourself why you want to change by saying something like, “Change is healthy. I do not get stuck in the same routines.” When you repeat this often enough, it becomes your response to the anxiety you feel. This makes changes easier for you to handle.
Some lifestyle changes are harder than others to become accustomed to even when we desire to make the changes. Many times, just one of these tips will help you to implement the change, while other times you may need to use a variety of methods to feel at ease about the change.
Use the “pro and con” method to see the benefits. Then bring the change in gradually while you accept it through your affirmations. These techniques will help you feel confident so you can enjoy the benefits of your new lifestyle.