Host: Joseph Lewin

Guest: Chris Cirullo — Founder, Mission Fit Dads (helping busy Christian business leaders build healthy, lasting habits)

This show was originally aired on Aug 21, 2024 on LinkedIn.

The show is produced by Sell Through Social.

📌 Episode Snapshot

Joseph and Chris unpack why smart, driven entrepreneurs still struggle to build healthy habits—and how to rewire your brain so change actually sticks. They walk through practical frameworks, a simple daily scorecard, and a 15-minute morning routine that can work in any season of life.

🎯 Why This Matters

• Ambitious leaders often succeed in business while silently running on fumes.
• Most are “trying” instead of training, expecting overnight transformation.
• Without fixing habits, you eventually hit a ceiling—in health, family, and business.

🧠 Key Ideas & Takeaways

• Wrong expectations = constant failure loop
• People assume habits “just happen” instead of requiring design, repetition, and discomfort.
• They jump straight to the ideal state (e.g., “I’m going to run a marathon”) instead of small, sustainable steps.
• Habits are well-worn paths—not erased, but replaced
• Old habits rarely disappear; you must create a more compelling alternative path and put “roadblocks” in front of the old one.
• Environment design (friction for bad habits, ease for good ones) is crucial.
• The Habit Loop
• Cue → Craving → Action → Reward.
• If you don’t intentionally engineer this loop for new habits and disrupt it for bad ones, you end up relying on willpower, which always runs out.
• Trying vs Training
• Trying: “I’ll wake up tomorrow and run 26 miles.”
• Training: “This week I’ll walk/run 1 mile, next week 2…”
• Transformation comes from progressive training, not heroic one-off effort.
• Google Maps Analogy: Current vs Desired State
• You need brutal honesty about where you really are and clarity about where you want to go.
• Without both points, you can’t plan a realistic route.
• Chris references the Stockdale Paradox: confront the brutal facts with relentless optimism.
• The Habit Health Ladder (Self-Assessment)
• Top: 8–12 months of consistent habits (rarely miss twice).
• Middle: Inconsistent good habits; sometimes long gaps.
• Bottom: Out-of-control habits; doing what you don’t want to do.
• If most of your life sits in the bottom three rungs, you’re in the red, even if one area looks “successful.”
• You can’t level up on “red” habits
• You may grow revenue or team size while in the red, but you can’t keep scaling or stay healthy without upgrading your habits.
• Eventually you hit burnout, like Chris did—massive success on the outside, collapse on the inside.

🧩 The Mission Fit Framework (Knowledge + Practice + Community)

• Knowledge
• Intake system for the right 20% of information that produces 80% of results.
• Feedback loops to refine what actually works for you.
• Practice (Habits)
• Clear daily routine (simple, repeatable).
• Regular micro → macro habit progression (start tiny, then build).
• Community
• Aligned friendships: people pursuing the same direction you want, not just where you currently are.
• Support, coaching, and accountability that reinforce your identity and actions.
• Belief at the Center
• Historically, “belief” = knowledge demonstrated by action.
• If you “know” something but don’t live it, it’s not yet a belief—just information.
• Right beliefs → right actions, especially when paired with accountability and optimization.

🌅 The 15-Minute Micro-Morning Routine

Chris’s goal: a routine you can do 365 days a year, in any season, on vacation, sick days, or busy days.

• 1) Spiritual/Mental (3–5 minutes)
• Read a small section (e.g., 5–15 verses of Scripture or another key text).
• Write a two-sentence journal entry (thought, question, response).
• Minimum counts: the mechanism matters more than depth on any given day.
• 2) Business Bottleneck Analysis (2 minutes)
• Ask: “What’s the biggest bottleneck in my business right now?”
• Leads? Conversion? Delivery/operations?
• Decide: “What is the single next step I can take today to move that bottleneck?”
• That step becomes your #1 priority task for the day.
• 3) Physical Health (2–3 minutes)
• Do something tiny but consistent (e.g., 25 pushups).
• Drink water.
• Then reward yourself (e.g., first cup of coffee).

Result: In under 15 minutes, you’ve touched spiritual/mental, emotional, business, and physical health. On good days, you can add more (longer workout, deep reading, extended planning), but the micro-routine never disappears.

🧭 Success vs Failure: The Real Difference

• Why people fail:
• No delayed gratification; measuring against the ideal daily instead of treating the ideal as a long-term goal.
• Taking steps that are too big, too fast.
• Living for accolades, not legacy.
• Why people succeed:
• They develop a multi-generational vision.
• My habits shape my kids.
• My kids’ habits shape their kids.
• I can either pass down dysfunction or break the cycle.
• They shift focus from “What am I achieving?” to
• “What am I leaving in my children, not just to my children?”

🗣️ Memorable Lines

• “Habits don’t disappear—you just build stronger ones on top of them.”
• “Trying is waking up to run a marathon; training is building from one mile to twenty-six.”
• “If the ideal is your measuring stick instead of your goal, you’ll live in constant disappointment.”
• “More is caught than taught—your kids will copy your habits, not your speeches.”
• “Are you chasing accolades, or building a legacy?”