Why don't diets work? How do I break a habit? What habits can I develop around a fulfilling career? These are the kind of questions Dr Gina Cleo gets asked every week...

She gets asked them, because the answers change lives. And these answers are the reason why Dr Gina is one of the incredible coaches behind the AllBright Elevator Digital program. Elevator Digital is a four-month, personalised online training and development program, facilitated by industry-leading coaches (including Dr Gina) to support women looking to step up to a C-suite or board level position. 

Having completed a PhD at Bond University in habit change, she's well-versed on not only the habits which will change our lives, but also on the habits which hold us back. 

Here, we ask her everything you’ve ever wanted to know about habits.

Ready to get some answers? Let’s go. 

Find out more about AllBright Elevator in Australia

Working as a dietitian, you noticed that clients' results were only short-term. Within a few weeks or months, they would put the weight back on, or go back to their old ways and mindsets – why is this? Can you share your personal ‘why’ for doing the work that you do?

I became really interested in sustainable change because people were getting really frustrated with going back to where they'd started. We'd work so hard on a goal, and we'd achieve that goal, and then, weeks or months later, they'd be back working on the same thing. It was frustrating for them, and it was frustrating for me. I became so interested in habits and understanding long-term solutions.

We tend to have a default set of habits that we fall back on when life gets busy or we're tired or stressed or whenever we're not in our tip-top self. Habits are easy. They're predictable. They don't require any effort or willpower. If you think of some of the habits you have in your life, that might be brushing your teeth in the morning, that's not something that you need an alarm to do or need a reminder to do. It just happens. A lot of our lifestyle habits are similar. We reach for convenience, and we just want to automate our lives as much as possible. 

You went on to study habit change – if we want to change a habit in our life, where do we begin?

We begin firstly, by knowing what our trigger is for that habit. Every habit is triggered. Habits have three key ingredients - a trigger, the routine, and then the reward. The trigger is essentially what sets off the habit. It's why we are engaging in that habit. The routine is the habit itself. The reward is basically our brain saying, "I got a positive thing out of that. So next time we're triggered again, let's do the same thing." The cycle continues.

The first step to changing any habit is knowing your trigger. Where are you when you're doing that habit? What time of day is it? Who are you with? How are you feeling in that moment? You need to understand the environment around you. 

We focus so much on the behaviour when really, we need to shift our focus towards the trigger because as soon as you're triggered, it’s an automatic, split-second reaction in our brain.

At AllBright, we want to inspire women to future proof their career and how to always look ahead. What are some habits we can develop around a healthy and fulfilling career?

I think having great mindset because the way we think is also habitual, not just what we do. Creating some rituals around productivity, whether that be checking emails only a couple of times a day or setting meetings into the afternoon because your most productive time is in the morning. Whatever it is for you, make it a ritual. Let your team know that that's what you do so that's what the expectations are.

Also, creating healthy boundaries around your time and blocking out time for you. Every Friday afternoon, I block-out time and don't do any meetings. I don't do any other work other than what I've assigned. And that's in my calendar every single week. My beautiful assistants know that I'm just not going to be available then. My final one would be taking breaks. Every hour on the hour, for example, take a five-minute breather so you can just rejuvenate and get back into it again.

We work in an always-on​ culture – we warm up with coffee and cool down with wine – why do these habits work against us? Yet why are they so hard to break?

What we really need is rejuvenating rest and realistic expectations. When we think, again, of the why we're having coffee and why we're cooling down with wine, essentially, we're trying to elevate our energy levels and then de-stress at the end of the day. So why is it that we don't have great energy levels? Why is it we're feeling stressed at the end of the day? It's going back to our lifestyle choices. The reason they're so hard to break is because they're automatic. They're socially acceptable. They're easy. They're accessible. They're mostly effective. At the end of the day, the pain of not doing them probably outweighs the negative effects of doing them. I'm personally not a coffee drinker. I'm a tea drinker. But, if you were to say to me, don't have tea in the morning, you'd have to have a pretty good reason because I mean, me and tea are best friends.

Your passion is teaching people to achieve long-term success through the power of habits – what are some habits you have implemented in your daily life which help you to thrive?

The most productive habit that's been researched and the one that I do quite regularly is that I incorporate movement into my day. And that might be that I do exercise in the morning, or I walk my dog on the beach in the evenings. Or, if I don't make time for either of those, then I make sure that I'm getting up during my day and just having a stroll around. I try to keep moving my body.

I've also got a pretty good sleep routine, so I go to bed similar time. I wake up at similar time. I have very protected power-out time where I don't have my emails or my phone on. If I'm writing anything like proposals or any content, then I turn off everything. If it's for several hours, I'll even put on an autoresponder so that people don't panic that I'm not available because I think we live in a culture where we're always on and available.

Do you find people do look ahead, or are most of us buried under the daily grind? What are some benefits of forward-planning when it comes to our careers?

I think a bit of both happens. Some people do look ahead, but some people are just in the daily grind, almost reactive to their work requirements. A lot of that depends on your personality, how much you've got on, how much is in your control to change, how confident you are in the work that you're doing and maybe how long you've been doing it. Looking ahead allows us to target goals and to design our day and live in a way that can actually help us to achieve those goals. We can also look back and recognise what we've achieved because we know where we were when we started and where we are now as a result of forward planning. I love forward planning. My default is to be in the daily grind because there's so much on, but I find that with the less pressure that I've got on and the less time pressure I have, the more forward planning I can be and the more reflective I can be on the work that I've done as well.

A habit many of us have is looking at our phone the minute we wake up, often it’s the first thing we will do before we even say hello to our partner or children. How does this habit impact our day?

I think overall it reduces our productivity and we become swayed by the emotions we feel from whatever we've been exposed to. They might not be strong emotions, but there's certainly going to be some underlying things going on in there, whether you've compared yourself to somebody, whether there's some bad news, whether you're just troubled by the things that are going on in the world. You've exposed your best self, which is that first thing in the morning, to the potential emotional sways of that. Essentially, it's then taking away your focus. It's taking away your attention, which overall then reduces your level of productivity.

I want to talk about breathing. Why is making breathing a habit so important, and why aren't more people aware of it?

Being mindful and conscious of how we breathe is so important. We know that those deep breaths, even five deep breaths or three deep breaths can reduce anxiety levels so much more effectively than a whole lot of other strategies that people use. What happens, though, when we feel anxious or when we feel overwhelmed is we start to shallow breathe, and we chest breathe rather than belly breathe. It then exacerbates our anxiety and makes it even worse. As soon as I get to my computer, first thing in the morning, I stop and I take five deep breaths in. So, I've already started in a calmer state. I try to do some kind of breathing every hour on the hour because that's how I remind myself to do it. It takes literally 10 seconds. It's just three breaths in, hold, three breaths out. And it makes such an incredible difference to your day. 

Finally, why don’t diets work? I know everyone wants to the answer to this…

Diets don't work because they don't fit into our lifestyle. They're not created to be sustainable because when you are hungry, for example, or your brain is depleted because you're not eating carbohydrates or another food group, we lose self-control. The more hungry you are, the more self-control you are losing. And that's a brain thing. You can't control that. We're sort of asked to live in a state of depletion and to continue struggling through that although our families or our colleagues are still going on about their eating day, and we're being tempted by foods around us. Diets don't work. They're not designed to work. Diets are always meant to be a temporary thing. When we go off our diets we're like, "I can finally eat whatever I want to." We end up straight back where we started or even worse off than we started. The short answer is because they aren't created with the tools and strategies to be sustainable.