When you want to form new habits: 4 tips for success
Last time, we focused on setting goals that stick. Many times achieving goals means changing existing habits or forming new ones.
Habits are tough. When I was younger in my career, I learned that it takes 21 days to form a habit. I thought that sounded reasonable. So, if I wanted to stop snacking, stop biting my fingernails, or go to the gym regularly, I simply needed to do, or not do, that activity for three weeks and all would be golden.
Wrong. Habit forming is ongoing and can take a lot longer to stick. When we are in times of stress, we naturally fall back into old patterns or bad habits. Sometimes, we don’t even know we’re doing something that we want to stop. For example, I don’t always realize I am biting my nails until I look down and they are gone. We must be hyper-aware when our old habits get triggered and proactively decide how to respond in the moment before they are triggered.
Research today suggests it takes months (at least 90 days) to stick with a new habit. Noom, the weight loss app I mentioned last time, proposes that we don’t go from the beginning to the end goal in a straight, continuous line, i.e., losing weight. Instead, we experience a journey that is up, down, up, down, and squiggly.
We experience this kind of line: Up (The Hype and Honeymoon), Down (The Plummet and Lapse), Squiggly (Slips and Surges)
We need to have grace with ourselves that we will eat a piece of cake, we will skip a day at the gym, and we will bite our fingernails again. So, how do we have success if we want to break the old and make new habits?
I have read many self-improvement books in my life. All of them had at least one nugget for me to apply in my daily life. Atomic Habits by James Clear was no exception. It seems like Noom leverages a lot of Clear’s ideas to help people build healthy habits around food, water intake, movement, exercise, sleep, and mental health.
Clear states 4 main principles for habit-building success: make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, and make it satisfying. For me, these are all critical to changing behavior whether you are trying to control a sweet tooth or committing to giving feedback to your team regularly – a habit I found hard to get into but critical for team growth, engagement, and results.
Based on Noom’s and Clear’s principles, here are four tips I established for myself in building habits. And, just to say it, I have succeeded in setting some new habits but I continue to struggle with others. This is okay. We are all a giant WIP (work in progress) as long as we are trying to make progress.
1. Describe how you will feel because of the habit.
Instead of focusing on what the habit is, such as providing ongoing feedback to my team, focus on the results you will realize because you formed the habit of giving feedback. If we dwell on the fact that giving feedback is uncomfortable or not natural to us, we will never succeed with it. Instead, focus on the fact that my team will have a clearer direction on what to develop, or we will have a relationship based on trust because I am being honest. Describing and visualizing these results will help us form the new habit.
2. Break the habit down into smaller steps.
Much like big goals, we need to break the habit into smaller pieces so we can make reasonable progress. If we take giving feedback, for example, we can break this down in two ways. 1) We can wean ourselves into giving feedback. We can start by offering to give feedback once a quarter, then move to monthly, and then try to be immediate with it. 2) Or we can identify the components of giving feedback and try to adopt these one by one. For example, giving feedback is made up of a few activities: observing behavior, asking questions, listening, sharing specifics, guiding/advising, providing resources, and checking in frequently. We could start by observing our team more closely. How many of us multitask while our team members are presenting or problem-solving? Start there first. Then, move on to making a bigger effort to ask questions to debrief a project. If we know the tasks that comprise the bigger habit, we can start to adopt them in smaller chunks.
3. Define accountability that works for you.
Every workshop I have ever attended about behavior change recommends finding an accountability partner – someone who will hold you accountable and vice versa for trying new things. If that works for you, then by all means find a partner. Some of us simply schedule time in our calendars to work on something or make a list of actions that week that we must cross off before the weekend. I have mantras on my bulletin board along with a vision board to keep habits I want to form in front of me. My Apple Watch is also pretty good at telling when to get up and when to move. I set timers to time-box tasks so I focus and make progress. Accountability may be different for everyone. Some of us are motivated from within; others need external people, conditions, or devices to motivate us, like a partner or a timer. There is no right or wrong but know yourself and pick something that will keep you persistent and motivated.
4. Cut yourself some slack.
Last, but not least, we need to have grace with ourselves. Change is hard. Whether we ease ourselves into something or rip the band-aid, we will be caught up in the Hype-Plummet-Slips-and-Surges path to our new habit. This is 100% human and 100% expected. If we expect perfection, we will fail. If our goal is to completely stop a bad habit altogether, this can be especially tough. Eliminating something, like never eating sweets again or never having a negative thought again, can be difficult, and, in some cases, may work against us in the marathon we are running. Moderation and a concerted effort to minimize these habits is a success. You cannot expect perfection from yourself.
Breaking or forming habits can be difficult. We need to set ourselves up for success by having the right mindset (progress over perfection) and by taking steps every day on the Hype-Plummet-Slips-and-Surges path. The key is always moving forward, learning lessons when you don’t, and trying again the next day.
Don’t punish yourself for plummeting or slipping as this is natural. So, if you don’t give feedback at the time you want to, try again next time. If you slipped and had a brownie, set yourself up better next time by having your dessert handy like a square of dark chocolate. If you fall back into negative thinking, pull yourself up, say “Oh well”, and catch yourself next time before you go there.
We can do this. Habit forming takes more than 21 days. We are all in this for the long haul and habits take time. Good luck!