Choose the Habits That Close the Gap
Build Your Best 2026 · Part 3 of 5
From Part 2, Understand What Your Goals Really Require, you should be sitting with a clear understanding of the gap between where you are now and what your goals demand.
You know where you’re going. You know what your goals require. And you can see where your current life doesn’t yet support that work.
Closing that gap is central to getting where you want to be.
This is the point where a lot of people stall. They’ve done the thinking, they’ve named the demands, and then they either freeze under the scale of the work or overcorrect by trying to take on everything at once. Others stay stuck in analysis, continuing to re-evaluate the gap instead of taking action to close it.
Neither approach tends to produce steady progress.
What does move things forward is when ambition and planning are translated into repeated efforts that show up consistently in your days and weeks.
Habits aren’t about more discipline or willpower. In this process, they exist to reduce the distance between where you are now and what your goals require from you.
If a habit does not directly support that job, it becomes background noise. It might feel productive in the moment, but it won’t meaningfully move the year forward.
This part of the series is about choosing habits with intention and precision. Not the most habits. Not the hardest ones. Just the few daily and weekly actions that, repeated over time, make the gap between current capacity and future demand smaller.
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” — Will Durant
If you’re ready to stop guessing and start building the habits that close the gap, let’s talk. Book your FREE Discovery Call, and we’ll look at where you are now, what your goals require, and which daily and weekly habits will move you forward without overloading your life.
What a Gap-Closing Habit Is (and Isn’t)
A gap-closing habit exists to address a specific challenge you identified in Part 2. It reflects the person you’re trying to become, not the person you’ve been.
That gives you a simple filter. A habit earns its place only if it strengthens something your goals depend on.
If your goal requires more weekly training volume, the habit needs to create protected time to train.
If your goal requires more consistency, the habit needs to reduce skipped sessions.
If your goal requires a new skill, the habit needs to put you in regular contact with that skill often enough to improve.
If you can’t clearly explain how a habit moves you closer to who you want to be, it isn’t closing the gap.
This is the difference between useful habits and busy-work ones.
Busy-work habits feel responsible, but they mainly keep you occupied.
Tracking lots of health metrics without changing how you train or recover.
Consuming books, podcasts, or courses without applying what you learn.
Over-organizing, over-planning, or endlessly cleaning systems instead of doing the work they’re meant to support.
These habits create motion without progress, and often serve as a form of procrastination.
Train. Write. Practice. Study. Strength train. Cook real meals. Go to bed on time. Walk daily. Do mobility work. Preplan workouts. Sit down for focused work. Schedule recovery.
It describes something you do, not something you prepare to do.
A gap-closing habit is an action that aligns your behavior with the person you’re trying to become. Each repetition reinforces that identity and narrows the distance between who you are today and who you want to be.
Start With the Minimum Reps That Matter
Even when people choose the right habits, most never turn them into lasting behavior because they start at the version they admire instead of the version they can repeat.
They picture the person they want to become and try to act like that person immediately.
Training every day with speed work, long runs, strength, and mobility all scheduled perfectly.
Running a ninety-minute morning routine with journaling, breathwork, reading, planning, and a workout before work.
Trying to eat perfectly, sleep eight hours, recover completely, and hit every workout in the same week.
Writing for an hour every single day with a high word-count goal and no missed sessions.
Trying to study multiple skills at once while keeping up with books, courses, notes, and practice.
Habits only turn into lasting behavior when they’re repeated long enough to stick. When the starting point is too big to repeat, the habit becomes harder to make a part of how you operate.
When you miss a rep once or twice, the habit falls apart and it’s easy to blame discipline.
But the real issue is scale. Minimum reps exist to solve that.
A minimum rep is the smallest real action that still counts as acting in line with the person you’re trying to become.
Two non-negotiable training sessions per week.
One anchor action that starts your morning.
Doing the basics even when the week isn’t clean.
Opening the document and writing one paragraph.
Practicing one skill until it improves.
These reps don’t need to look impressive. They need to be easily repeatable.
Starting smaller is about choosing a starting point so manageable that you’re still doing it a month from now — long enough for behavior to turn into identity. Over time, you’ll naturally scale up what you can take on.
Match Habits to Your Current Capacity
At this point, you know the habits that matter and you’ve defined a realistic starting point for each one. What’s left is the part that turns good ideas into real behavior.
Priority.
Habits don’t become priorities because you care about them. They become priorities when they have a place to live. A specific time. A clear trigger. A repeatable cue that removes the question of when the habit happens.
Without that, even well-chosen habits stay optional.
Matching habits to your current capacity means deciding when and where you will practice them inside the life you’re already living. Not the version of your life you hope to have later. The one you’re actually operating in right now.
This might look like:
Tying a training session to specific days instead of “sometime this week.”
Writing immediately after a consistent daily event instead of waiting for inspiration.
Doing stretches after workouts instead of hoping you’ll remember later.
Going to bed at a set time on work nights instead of aiming for better sleep in general.
The goal here isn’t to add more. It’s to remove uncertainty.
When a habit has a clear trigger and a defined place in your day, it stops competing for attention. The moment shows up, and the action follows.
This is what priority looks like in practice.
As you do this scheduling, you may need to adjust your expectations at first. Not because the habit doesn’t matter, but because your schedule is finite. Priority forces honesty. Some habits will start smaller than you hoped because there’s only so much time in the day, but that’s part of making them real.
Once habits have both a starting point and a place to live, consistency stops being something you hope for and becomes something your system supports. Over time, those habits will grow as they become deeper behaviors.
Build Habits That Stack Over Time
As you put these habits into action, the goal is not to do them perfectly. It’s just to do them at all.
Early reps are less about results and more about training expectation. You’re teaching your mind and body that this is something you do now. You show up. You act. You follow through, even when the output isn’t great yet.
That’s how learning works.
Quality comes after repetition, not before it. The first workouts won’t feel smooth. The early writing won’t feel sharp. The routine may feel awkward or incomplete. That’s normal. You’re building familiarity before refinement.
If you wait for the habit to feel good or look polished, you delay the learning that only reps can create. Action builds comfort. Comfort builds skill. Skill creates outcomes.
So don’t judge your habits by how they look in the beginning. Judge them by whether you’re showing up consistently enough for improvement to happen.
Reps first. Results later.
That’s how the gap to your future closes.
“Small disciplines repeated with consistency every day lead to great achievements gained slowly over time.” — John C. Maxwell
The work in this part of the series is simple, but not easy.
You’ve identified the gaps. You’ve chosen habits that directly close them. You’ve scaled them down to something repeatable to start with, and given them a place to live inside your real life.
That’s how progress stops being hypothetical.
The goal here isn’t to build the perfect routine or lock in the final version of your year. It’s to start behaving like the person you’re trying to become, one small rep at a time, in a way that can hold under the real conditions of your life today.
Those reps won’t feel dramatic at first. They’re not meant to. Their job is to establish expectations and make showing up a familiar action.
As those habits settle in, capacity will grow. What feels small now becomes automatic later, making room for more. And once the behavior is there, it becomes a lot easier to be flexible with your experiments — because you’re no longer guessing whether you can show up, only how you want to refine the work.
Next, we’ll look at the environment around you — the conditions that either make these habits easier or quietly work against them.
What is the smallest action you could repeat this week that would move you closer to who you want to be in 2026?