How To Implement New, Positive Habits For A More Successful Life.
1. Failing To Plan Is Planning To Fail
In this section we’re going to talk about the importance of preparation when you implement a new habit into your life.
Mental Preparation: Getting Your Mind on Board
The most common reason we fail when attempting to build new habits or work on new goals is lack of mental preparation. If you are reading this article, chances are you’ve tried and failed to form new habits many times in the past. Before you give it another try, you have to ask yourself
exactly why your previous attempts failed. Was it because you tried to implement too many habits at once? Did you lack a strong, intrinsic motivation to break the habit? Were you trying to do it for someone else rather than yourself? Or was it hard to fully believe in yourself? These are common sources of failure, but the reason behind yours might be completely different. Take some time to reflect upon the reasons your previous attempts have failed.
Anticipate Obstacles
Now that you’re clearly aware of the reasons behind your previous failures, it’s time to prepare yourself mentally. To do that, you must anticipate the obstacles that may prevent you from forming your new habit and sticking to it in the long run. After all, what’s the point of implementing a new habit if you drop it after a few months? Before starting your new habits, you have to take into account all the mental blocks you may have. Consider the following questions: How confident are
you that you can stick to this new habit? What are some potential obstacles that could lead you to give up?
Believing in Yourself
Do you believe you can stick to your new habit? If I were to ask you on a scale of 1 to 10 how confident are you that you’ll be able to stick to it for the next 30 days what would you say? If your score isn’t 8 or more you might need to chunk down your habits to make it more realistic and more
believable.
Now that you know where you stand regarding your new habit, can you identify all the possible reasons why you could fail?
Prepare Yourself for Obstacles
Things rarely go as planned and there are many things that may stand in your way as you try to establish new habits in your life. It’s essential to take the time to identify the roadblocks you may face with as much clarity as possible. So, what challenges do you think you’re likely to encounter. Let me give you an example of what your list may look like. Let’s assume your goal is to stick to your new diet, which includes reducing your sugar intake. Let’s further assume you’ve decided to
do this by breaking your habit of drinking sodas and choosing low-sugar beverages instead. In this case, you might face the following obstacles:
- Dinner with friends, because it’s difficult to eat healthy when everyone around you is eating tempting foods and drinking the sodas you are trying so hard to avoid.
- Fast-food chains, because you can easily grab unhealthy food and drinks on your way to work.
- Emotional eating, because people tend to crave sugar when stressed.
- Lack of support. If you’re the only one in your family or circle of friends who’s watching what they eat, it’s going to be difficult. It isn’t easy sticking to your habits while watching others indulge in the very things you’re trying to avoid.
- A weak “why” because you know you should eat healthy but don’t feel motivated enough to do so.
When considering these obstacles, it’s a good idea to figure out what triggers you to drink soda and what you can do to work around it. You might purge your fridge of all unhealthy beverages, join a support group, or enlist your friends to help you stay on track when you’re going out with
them. If you’ve made a past attempt at a similar diet that didn’t go well, you should think about why it didn’t work out and see what you can learn from that experience. It’s also advisable to sort through your underlying thoughts surrounding food. Perhaps you associate certain foods or even
excessive eating and drinking with enjoyable activities such as hanging out with friends or spending time with family. Or maybe you associate them with comfort and use them to cope with unpleasant feelings and situations. If any of these things is the case, it would be wise to adopt new beliefs that don’t support these unhealthy associations and links.
Now it’s your turn. What are some obstacles you’re likely to encounter and how will you overcome them? How will you address each of these obstacles, and what can you do to minimize them?
Have a Pre-emptive Plan
Optimism can make us motivated, but a dash of pessimism can help us succeed. Research shows that predicting how and when you might be tempted to break your vow increases the chances that you will keep a resolution. – Kelly McGonigal, The Willpower Instinct. By preparing yourself mentally and rehearsing how you’ll deal with challenging situations in the
future, you’ll significantly increase your ability to resist temptation and stay on track with your goals.In the instance of the low-sugar diet, you could visualize yourself entering a coffee shop and ordering a coffee with no sugar or another drink with a minimal amount of sugar. This may not be enough to prevent temptation entirely. It will, however, make it easier to make the right choice instead of acting on impulse. You could also visualize yourself opening the fridge and taking a bottle of water instead of a soda. As you continue to visualize yourself making healthy decisions,
you’ll increase your chances of successfully dealing with real-life temptation.
The “If… Then” Method
This is a highly effective approach to minimizing your chances of reverting to your old habits. In a nutshell, this method involves creating alternative to what you’re trying to avoid. This drastically decreases the risk of making the wrong choice.
Example:
- If I’m out with my friends, everybody is drinking soda, and I feel a strong to order one, too, then I will order a coke zero instead.
- If I see a coffee shop, then I will cross the street.
2. You Are The Product Of Your Environment
We’ve already discussed how you can use visualization to mentally prepare yourself for coping with tempting scenarios. In this section, however, we’ll go one step further by discussing how you can change your physical environment to reduce or even eliminate the obstacles on your list.
Making strategic changes to your environment will allow you to limit the amount of willpower you expend when performing your daily habit. You don’t want to leave any room for excuses and distractions, nor do you want to create unnecessarily tempting situations when you’re just getting started. If, for instance, you want to replace unhealthy foods and drinks with nutritious meals and water, the last thing you want is a fridge full of chocolate milk and frozen pizzas. Having chocolate milk in plain sight might not be good idea either.
Here are a few more examples of some of the ways that you can make your environment more conducive to developing new habits:
Example 1: Keeping your home free of junk food and your workspace clear of unhealthy snacks to avoid compulsive eating.
Example 2: Keeping your running shoes by your bed if you’re trying to make a habit of going for morning runs when you wake up.
Example 3: Putting cigarettes in a place that’s difficult to access if you’re trying to stop smoking. Or, storing them at a friend or relative’s place so that you have to ask them each time you want to smoke.
Surrounding Yourself With the Right People
Another major component of engineering a favourable environment is surrounding yourself with the right people. I once read a quote which stated the following: If you want to lose weight you should surround yourself with skinny people. Strange as it may sound, I’ve found the concept behind this quote to be very true.
I’m a firm believer of the power of surrounding yourself with people that have the kind of life you want. If your friends are all health-conscious, it’s obvious that there will be fewer temptations to eat unhealthy food when you go out with them. I’m not saying you should get rid of all your friends (though in certain cases it may be necessary). What I am saying is that you should surround yourself with as many people who encourage and exemplify your goals as possible.
Now that you’ve mentally prepared yourself and altered your environment to support your new habit, let’s look at how you can strengthen your commitment and make this new habit stick.
3. How Much Skin Do You Have In The Game?
Give it 100%
How often have you started something half-heartedly and wound up not getting results? The best example of this is those famous (or is it infamous?) New Year’s resolutions. To be frank, I think New Year’s resolutions are pretty ridiculous. I can’t help but wonder why I should wait until the beginning of next year to start setting some goals and improve my life. But I digress. The main problem with New Year’s resolutions is that most people who set them fail. The reason behind this
is simple: People who rely on New Year’s resolutions to make changes don’t have clear goals. If they had monthly and yearly goals, they wouldn’t need New Year’s resolutions. Because they don’t have a good understanding of how goal-setting actually works, their resolutions end in failure. Sadly, this isn’t surprising, considering the fact what a powerful yet underused tool goal-setting is.
Now, coming back to commitment, let’s be honest. You can’t really achieve anything if you aren’t 100% devoted to it. In this section, I’ll discuss some important points you need to consider when working on your new habit.
Understanding Your Why
It’s difficult to be fully devoted to achieving something when you don’t have a strong reason behind it. Think about some of the habits that you’ve tried to continually implement in the past only to fail miserably each time. We all have them. If you hate cleaning, for instance, it’s going to be difficult to turn cleaning your house into a daily habit. You may understand from a logical standpoint that you should clean your place, but if you’re honest with yourself, you don’t really care (wait, am I talking about myself here?). My lack of excitement for cleaning aside, if a
particular habit isn’t all that important to you, you won’t see clear benefits to it. And that isprecisely why you’ll fail. To avoid this, you would have to give cleaning a new meaning. Otherwise, it’s not going to happen.
- Should vs. Want
Now, back to the new habit you’d like to implement. What words do you use when you talk about it? If you say something along the lines of “I should do X” then there’s a good chance that this is a habit you think you should adopt due to external pressure. This pressure can come from a variety of sources, such as your parents, friends, and colleagues, or even society itself. If, however, you tend to say “I want to do X”, it’s likely that it’s something that means a lot to you personally. As such, it will be easier for you to rely on intrinsic motivation, which increases your chance of success.
- What if My “Why” Isn’t Strong?
If you discover you don’t have a particularly strong “why” behind your habit, don’t panic. There are ways to work around this. Going back to our previous example of wanting to tidy up on a daily basis while battling a hatred of cleaning, let’s take a look at what you can do when your “why” is weak.
Solution 1: Use reframing to change what the task means to you.
If you don’t associate cleaning with anything positive, you could train yourself to see it from a different, more positive point of view. For example, would you clean your house if you had guests coming tonight? If the answer is yes, that tells me you care what others think about the way your home looks. It also tells me that neglecting to clean your place in that circumstance would cause feelings of shame and potentially lower your self-esteem. That means cleaning your home could be seen as part of taking care of yourself and having bolstering your self-esteem. You obviously care enough about your guests to do some cleaning. Why would you do something for them that you’re not willing to do for yourself? Doesn’t that seem like a sign of low self-esteem? You should care enough about tidying up on a regular basis and, when you think of it this way, cleaning probably sounds a lot more appealing. The great thing is that this type of reframing can be applied to any other habit that lacks a strong “why”.
Solution 2: Delegate the task.
As simple as it may sound, you could decide to delegate or outsource the task. If no amount of reframing can change the fact that you hate cleaning and see little value in it, it’s probably not a wise way to use your time. Why not spend a little bit of money and hire someone to clean every
once in a while? You can then invest the time you would have spent cleaning into more meaningful tasks.
Write Down Your Habit
Writing down your habits and goals is the first step to turning them into reality. I like to write both daily and long-term goals on paper.
At this point, you should have already written down the new habit you want to add to your life. If you haven’t, grab a pen and paper and write down exactly what your new habit is. Then, write down what makes it important to you.
Ideally, you should read the “what” and “why” of your habit out loud every day to strengthen and maintain your commitment.
Have an Accountability Partner
Another powerful way to stick to your new habits is to have an accountability partner. Having an accountability partner that can monitor your progress, provide motivation, and give advice is
tremendously helpful. Some people even hire life coaches for this very reason, they want someone to support them as they make positive life changes. An accountability partner can be anyone that motivates, encourages, and supports you.
Being held accountable by another person has another benefit: It provides a major incentive to follow-through. You don’t want to have to tell someone that you didn’t do what you promised you would, or that you fell off the wagon. And you certainly don’t want to disappoint someone who believes in and is rooting for you.
You may want to take this benefit a step further by incorporating consequences. It could be something as simple as agreeing to give a certain amount of money to your accountability partner if you fail to stick to your habit.
Something like that is great because it forces you to ask yourself an indirect but extremely important question: How much do I believe in my ability to stick to my habit? If you’re scared of betting money, then you don’t fully believe in yourself. Being willing to bet money shows that
you’re completely committed and really believe in yourself. The more you’re willing to bet, the truer this is.
So take a few moments to think about your levels of commitment and self-belief. How much money are you willing to bet that you’ll stick with your new habit for the next 30 days.
Is there anyone you have in mind for your accountability partner? It may take some time to find someone who fits the bill, but it will ultimately happen. So, let’s discuss what you should do once you find the right person.
When you talk to your accountability partner, you should discuss the following:
- Your habit
Talk about what your habit is (in as much detail as possible) and how the two of you will know if you’ve succeeded in implementing it. Decide how many days you’ll commit to. Will you stick to your habit for 30 days? 60? Perhaps 90? Pin down the length of time and set a completion date.
- What You’re Committing To
Come up with a clear declaration of exactly what you intend to do. If, for instance, you want to start working out on a daily basis, you would say “I’m making a commitment to go to the gym every morning for the next 30 days.”
- Why This Habit Matters to You
Go over what you’ll gain from honouring your commitment, and contemplate the consequences of failing to establish the habit.
- What You Expect From One Another
This subject should be covered in great detail. Establish their wants and needs as well as your own. And, most importantly, make sure you’re both on the same page regarding your partnership.
- How You’ll Relay Your Progress
Decide how you’ll keep in touch. Some people prefer WhatsApp or text messages, others prefer phone calls, and still others prefer face-to-face communication. Pick the method of communication that’s best for you both. Last but not least, determine how often you’ll update them on your
progress.
- Consequences
Figure out what will happen if you succeed or fail. Will there be rewards for your success, and if so, what will they be? What about penalties? Reneging on your commitment could mean giving a set amount of money to your activity partner, or there might be something else that serves as a disincentive to giving up.
An Extra Tip: Consider sending a daily WhatsApp or text message to your accountability partner after engaging in your habit. How’s that for commitment?
It’s essential to be as specific as possible about the arrangement. And whatever you do, make sure your accountability partner is someone who understands the importance of your new habit and takes it as seriously as you do.
Join a Support Group
Support groups are yet another great tool. As I’ve said before, it is absolutely crucial that you surround yourself with people that will encourage you to achieve your goal. Being part of a group of people whose objectives are similar to yours will certainly help you tremendously. If your daily habit is part of a larger goal, joining a support group is one of the best things you can do. Can you think of a group you could join that would support your new habit? If not, the internet is a great place to start. There are forums dedicated to self-improvement and changing your habits. There are also meetups for people interested in forming new habits, as well as meetups for people that are already engaging in a specific habit (such as jogging, meditating, or running). You may not
have many people in your life who are focused on self-improvement, but meeting others who are trying to build new habits is easier than you think!
Be Willing to Invest in Yourself
If you’re genuinely committed to make changes in your life, you should be willing to put a little money towards it. If your habit is truly important, you’ll probably be willing to put quite a bit of money towards it. Imagine if you had paid some money to read this article. How much more committed do you think you would be? It’s highly likely that you would be determined to get the most out of it. No one wants to waste money, especially large sums of it.
As such, you can use money as an incentive to stick to your goals. If you’ve been consistently struggling to adopt a new habit, you can increase your level of commitment by investing in something to help you, whether it’s a book, course, therapist, or coach. I’ve purchased some great resources over the years, and they’ve served as powerful incentives to push through obstacles and make the changes I desire.
I’m a strong believer in investing in structured programs rather than wasting time trying to compile scattered information that may or may not give you results. It’s often very time-consuming and exhausting, to say nothing of how difficult it is to verify the accuracy of what you find. As a result, I invest as much money in myself as I can, and I highly recommend you do the same.
In our next article we shall discuss on how to execute your new habits like a champion, so that you get great results and more fulfillment in life.
Get ready!