11 important things to remember when changing habits
INDEX
- Start small
- Stay small
- Bad days are 100 percent occurrence
- Those who track it hack it
- Measure once, do twice
- Every day they make a difference
- They are never fully automated
- What led you here will not lead you there.
- Set a goal and then forget it
- Punish yourself
- Reward yourself
Most gurus talk about habits in a way that doesn't help you:
You need to try harder. You cannot be lazy. You need to wake up at 5 am. You need more motivation. You can never fail ... blah blah, "insert more gibberish here."
But let me share with you the unconventional truths that I discovered:
To develop and change habits, you don't need motivation or wake up at 5 in the morning. Heck, you can fail multiple times, be lazy, have no motivation, and still do it easily.
It is quite simple and easy to do, especially with the following list that I will show you. But remember, Jim Rohn used to say:
"What is simple and easy to do is also simple and easy not to do."
The important things to remember when changing your habits are simple and easy, just don't think they don't make any difference because they do.
In fact, they are the only things that make a difference.
Let's see what those little things are, okay?
Start small
The biggest mistake I see people making with habits is going big. You don't go big ... ever. You start small with your habits.
Do you want to develop a habit of reading books? Don't start reading one book a day. Start with 10 pages a day.
Do you want to be a writer? Don't start writing 10,000 words a day. Start with 300 words.
Do you want to lose weight? Do not stop eating ice cream. Eat one less ball of it.
Whatever it is, you should start small. Starting big always leads to failure. It has to, because it is not sustainable.
Start small. How small? The amount must be in your comfort zone. So if you think reading 20 pages of a book is too much, start with 10 or 5.
It has to seem easy and easy to do.
Do less today to do more in a year.
Stay small
There is a notion of Kaizen that means continuous improvement. They use this notion in habits where they tell you to start reading 1 page of a book per day and then gradually increase the amount you make over time.
But the problem with this approach is the bottom line, where "improvement" stops.
If I stop reading 1 page of a book a day and gradually reach 75 and 100, when do I stop? When do I get 1 book per day? That is simply absurd.
When you start a habit, keep it at the intensity you have decided on. Don't push yourself for more.
I started reading 20 pages of a book a day. More than 2 years have passed and I have read 101 books in that period. There is no way the number will increase in the future.
Why?
Because reading 40 to 50 books a year is enough.
The same applies to any other habit out there.
Choose a (small) number and stay there.
Bad days are 100 percent occurrence
No matter how good you are, you will have bad days when you will not make your habit. Period.
There is no way to avoid this. Therefore, it is better to prepare for when that happens rather than thinking that it will never happen.
What I do when I lose one day of my habit (s) is that I try to recover the next day while trying to make habits for those two days.
An example of this is that if I read 20 pages of a book a day and lose one day, the next day I will have to read 40 pages of a book. If I miss writing 500 words, the next day I need to write 1000.
This is a really important point that we will discuss later on rewards and punishments.
This is how I prepare for bad days when I drop my habit (s) and it is also a role model for you to take.
Those who track it hack it
When you track an activity, you can objectively say what you did in the past days, weeks, months, and years. If you don't track, you will surely forget everything you did.
There are many different ways you can track your activities today, from Habitica to a simple excel sheet I use, and even a WhatsApp tracker.
Peter Drucker said:
"What you track is what you do."
So stick to it, it really helps.
But monitoring is accompanied by an easier activity: measurement.
Measure once, do twice
Peter Drucker also said:
"What you measure is what you improve."
So, along with my tracker, I have numbers with which I measure the doses of daily activities:
To read, there are 20 pages.
To write, there are 500 words.
For the gym, it's 1 (I went) or 0 (I didn't go).
To budget, it is to write down the income and expenses.
Tracking and measuring go hand in hand, take less than 20 seconds a day, but create so much momentum that it's incredible.
Every day they make a difference
Will one day in the gym get you in shape? It will not.
Two? They will not.
Three? They will not.
Which means that a single gym session will not make you fit. But after 100 gym sessions, you will look and feel fit.
What happened? Which one made you fit?
The answer to this (Sorites paradox) [1] is that no gym session made you fit, everyone did.
No day makes a difference, but when combined, everyone does. So trust the process and go on (small).
They are never fully automated
Gurus tell you that habits become automatic. And yes, some do, like showering in a certain way of brushing their teeth.
But some habits do not become automatic, they become a lifestyle.
What I mean by that is that you won't automatically "wake up" in the gym and wonder how it got there.
It will simply become part of your lifestyle.
The difference is that you do the first automatically, without conscious thought, while the other is part of how you live your life.
It is not automatic, but it is a decision that does not reflect or think: it just does.
At some point it will be easy, but it will never be fully automated.
What led you here will not lead you there.
Marshall Goldsmith has a great book with the same title. The phrase means that sometimes you will have to get rid of certain habits to make room for others that will take you to the next step.
Don't be afraid to develop your habits when you feel like they're not taking you where you want to go.
When I started reading, it was about reading business and tactics books. But two years later, I switched to philosophy books that teach me nothing "applicable", but rather teach me how to think.
The most important 21st century ability is the ability to learn, unlearn, and relearn. The strongest tree is the willow, not because it has the strongest root or the largest trunk, but because it is flexible enough to support and hold anything.
I know how a willow, adapting to new ways of doing things.
Set a goal and then forget it
The most successful of us know what they want to achieve, but don't focus on it.
Does it sound paradoxical? You're right, it does. But here is the logic behind this.
You must have the goal of doing something: "I want to become a healthy individual," and then you must reverse engineer your habits: "I will go to the gym four times a week."
But once you have your goal, you must "forget it" and focus solely on the process. Because you are working in the process of becoming healthy and it is always in process. It will only be as healthy as taking care of your body.
So you have a goal that is not static, but keeps moving forward.
If you went to the gym 150 times a year and reached your goal, what would you do then? You would stop going to the gym.
This is why goal-oriented people experience the yo-yo effect [2] and why process-oriented people do not.
The difference between process-oriented and goal-oriented people is that the first approach focuses on daily actions, while others focus only on reward at the finish line.
Punish yourself
The last two sections are purely Pavlovian: you must punish bad behavior and reward good behavior. You are the only person who decides what is good and what is bad for you, but when you do, you must follow it rigorously.
I told you in point # 3 about bad days and how after one happens I double the job the next day. That is one of my forms of punishment.
It is the need to tell your brain that certain behaviors are unacceptable and lead to poor results. That's what punishments are for.
You must tell your brain that there are real consequences for losing your daily habits.
There is no favorite food to eat or favorite show to watch or go to the movies for a new Marvel movie: none, zero, zero.
The brain will remember these bad feelings and try to avoid the behaviors that led to them as much as possible.
But don't forget the other side of the same coin.
Reward yourself
When you follow through and execute your plan, reward yourself. This is how the brain knows you did something good. Every time I finish one of my habits for the day, I open my tracker and fill it with a number. As soon as I finish reading 20 pages of a book a day (or a little more), I open the tracker and type in the number.
The cell turns green and gives me an instant endorphin boost, a huge hit for the day. Then it's about not breaking the chain and having as many green fields as possible. After 100 days, I do some numbers and see how I did it.
If I have less than 10 days of cheating, I will reward myself with an excellent meal in a restaurant. You can create your own rewards and they can be daily, weekly, monthly, or any arbitrary time table you create. Primoz Bozic, a productivity coach, has gold, silver, and bronze medals as his reward system. If you are having trouble creating a system that works for you, please contact me by email and we can discuss details.
In the end, what you do matters not only matters to you but to the people around you. When the quality of your life increases, indirectly it increases the quality of life of the people around you. And sometimes, that's all the "motivation" we need to get started. And that's the best quote for the end of this article: "Motivation helps you get started, but habits keep you going." Keep going.
