12 Key Attitudes for Success: Attitudes to Habit

7 – Attitudes to Habit

So much lasting change that we can embed in our lives comes through establishing habits; our attitude to habits is crucial to our long-term success. We can push to make something happen, but the change you can create by doing 1% better daily for 90 days is almost 2.5 times that. Habits are the key; once you’ve established a habit, it’s a foundation you can build.??

What is your attitude to habits??

In my view, the most successful attitude to habits is to continually build more habits into your life that build your success and end habits that undermine your success.??

The whole dieting industry has relied upon the fact that people cannot build habits successfully. The way that they continue to reinforce this inability to build habits successfully is to promise people miracles through short commitments that will create lasting change. The sad truth is that for most people, the latest fad diet just reinforces the yo-yo of short-term weight loss and long-term weight gain.??

How can you successfully build new habits??

You have to take a medium-term view. Any significant, persistent change can only happen if you give yourself an extended implementation period. In my experience, the most powerful way to reinforce habits is to?

• set realistic goals for establishing those habits?
• build them slowly over time
• create a very immediate positive feedback mechanism?
• continually review the benefits of the good habit or the impact of the bad habit.

Breaking a bad habit

Let’s say that you want to cut down on your smoking. It is hopeless for most people to cut down on their smoking by making an unrealistic goal that, in one day, will change from 40 a day to zero.

A realistic first step could be to reduce the number of packs per week from 14 to 12.

Once you have succeeded in reducing your smoking to 12 packs a week over three weeks, reduce it to 10 packs per week for three weeks, and so on. After less than six months, you can contemplate the option of limiting yourself to one cigarette a day.

A powerful, immediate positive feedback mechanism is to set aside the ￡9.50 – ￡14.00 (Tesco prices Jan-22) per pack you have saved into a reward fund. ￡20 per week for a month could be a special meal for two. If you reduce your spending to one packet a fortnight, you save ￡135 a week, more than ￡7k per year (a winter holiday for two in a luxury tropical resort!). However, the second thing is to have a level of realism about how you will move to that goal.??

When you start, you can buy those 12 packets at the beginning of the week and then make them last until the end. It’s not about what happens on any one day, but you’ve built a habit of reducing your smoking. Once you feel confident at 12 packets a week, take the next step and go from 12 to 10. You’re building more confidence in your ability to achieve your goals. You are increasing the reward with the money that you save. You’re managing an addiction to a bad habit sensibly.

Experts on addictions say that nicotine is more addictive than heroin and harder to kick than heroin. Although bad habits create problems for you in the long term, they serve you in the short term. You need to substitute a short-term reward to break them.

Starting a good habit

Let’s imagine you’re somebody who is pretty much a couch potato. You spend almost all your time either lying down or sitting down. Most of the walking you do is to and from the car or to and from different rooms in your house. Your immediate goal is to achieve the NHS recommendation of 150 minutes of moderate-intensity activity spread evenly over five days a week (30 minutes of brisk walking per session). The simplest way of building a new habit is to use ‘habit stacking’. You take an existing habit and build an extra habit on it.

Your morning routine is getting out of bed, having coffee, showering, getting ready, and starting work. Where in that sequence could you stack an extra habit? Maybe the place to do it is between that coffee and the shower. Having laid out your walking gear the night before (the power of pre-decision), the first thing you do when you get out of bed is to get dressed in your gear. Make your cup of coffee, but put it in a flask. Take your brisk walk while sipping your coffee. Now you’re back, complete the rest of your routine.

Set easily achievable initial goals: success is two mornings out of seven in the first week. Then reward yourself. What is the reward going to be? Put up a chart. It’s amazing how children’s behaviours at school change when there’s a star chart on the fridge. Share your star chart with members of your family. They may laugh at you at first. As your stars build up, you will show you can do two mornings, consistently week in and week out. You can put an extra star on when you do three. You’re slowly building up a new habit.

Conclusions

With these tools, you can build the habit of breaking bad habits and starting new habits.

Your attitude to habits can change from ‘habits are hard’ to ‘habits – I can make them work for me’.

With this?Attitude to Habits, you are developing your?Attitudes for Success.