The (deceptive) simplicity of self-improvement

As the year and decade draw to a close, many of us start reflecting on what we have achieved this year and what we want to achieve in the year(s) to come. For my part, I’ve always had a strong desire for continuous self-improvement, and found the ideas on this topic fascinating, but found translating that into lasting behavioural change more challenging. In an effort to change that, this year I engaged with a professional coach (Karina Hulstrom) and read/listened to several productivity books to keep my mind focused and fresh with ideas. The ones I want to highlight in this article are Atomic Habits by James Clear, Hyperfocus by Chris Bailey and The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg.

These books all contain some powerful methods for achieving success in any area of your life. I’ve not perfected the techniques by any means but wanted to share some of these learnings with my network in the hope that it will inspire others on a similar path.

One of the most important things I realised was the fallacy of the opening sentence of this article - of holding your view of how successful you are on the result of achieving some (often arbitrary) external goals that you may have only set by looking at what others are doing. Goals are useful for direction and motivation but aren’t in themselves what makes you successful or allows you to create lasting change. You can have a goal of getting promoted during the year but then what? You’ve made your happiness dependent on something happening (which is likely out of your control to a degree anyway) and just having the desire for it isn’t likely to get you very far. Rather, you have to understand the habits and behaviours of individuals who embody that more senior position and look to build those yourself. In other words, you shift the focus to the systems and processes you need in order to cultivate better habits and behaviours. Hopefully, a promotion will at some point be the result of this once it is noticed though even if it doesn’t happen straight away, you’ve achieved your own personal goal of self-development and are continuing to grow which is a far more significant and long-lasting outcome. I lost a lot of weight just before I got married (over 5 years ago) but put it back on soon afterward because I was so focused on the short term goal that I never built the right habits and mindset shift to sustain it.

Similarly, when we look at someone who has achieved something we aspire to - say writing a book - what we see wasn’t a result of some overnight activity but rather a cultivation of small (atomic) habits, such as getting into the habit of writing for at least 10 minutes per day even when you don’t necessarily feel like it. If the potential writer only ever just had a goal of writing the book because they liked the idea of being an author, s/he would feel motivated on some days and less so on others; eventually, the motivation might fade or other commitments take priority and the book never gets finished. I too have been on this journey this year in building a technical learning website for the community (more on this in the new year!) - I massively underestimated the time it would take to do all the peripheral things and faced many competing demands for my time, so have needed to change my approach.

The news that humans are habitual creatures wasn’t new to me (I studied Aristotle at university who remains one of the thought leaders in this space centuries later!), but the real-life scenarios outlined in the Power Of Habit made me realise how much habit dictates everything we do from how we spend our time, how we react to situations, our performance at work and our relationships at home. Habits are an efficiency feature of the brain - as soon as we become familiar with the situations we find ourselves in (which is most of our lives), auto-pilot mode kicks in sub-consciously and we act according to habit. Habits are based on a neurology loop: we have a cue (e.g stress/anxiety), a routine (e.g smoking a cigarette) and a reward (the nicotine hit) which drives a craving for the same reward the next time we face the same cue:

This is obvious when we think about things that we know are habitual but most of the time we’re oblivious to the cues and rewards which are driving the habit loop. So the first activity to either start a new (good) habit or change a bad one is to start to recognise your habits and the cues/rewards that surround them.

Let’s start with cultivating a new habit. Good habits that we want to cultivate are almost always those that have long term benefits but short term pain (with the reverse true for bad habits), so to start with they require discipline to do. Discipline only takes you so far though - and will likely waver when you are stressed and/or stretched for time - so, in the long run, this needs to come from a change in how you see yourself. You need to see yourself as a writer, a community (or company) leader, and as a healthy person in order to cultivate the corresponding habits.

Visualisation (not the data kind!) is a useful tool to imagine yourself as the person you believe you are becoming, but you have to really feel the emotions associated with being that kind of person for it to be effective (your brain doesn’t know the difference between you imagining/feeling something and it actually happening). That means recognising and exploiting small wins and on that note, James Clear suggests starter habits. This is the idea that you start doing something for only two minutes per day - which requires very little commitment even when you’re stressed/have no time - but you ensure that you do it every day for two minutes. For things like exercise. two minutes per day in itself won’t get you any results but by just putting on your trainers and stepping out the door you’ve made a vote, to yourself, for the type of person you want to be and when it comes to habit formation it’s only those cumulative votes that count and not the amount of time that you spend actually doing it. Initially, the reward might just be that you feel good about having made an effort to do something, however small, that day; when you start exercising more, other rewards (such as the dopamine hit and starting to feel healthy) will take over and eventually these rewards will be strong enough to drive cravings so that each time you step in the door from work (cue) you put on your trainers and go out for a jog.

You should also make it as easy for yourself as possible to perform the routine - e.g change your environment to have healthy foods readily available and visible. Find a time in the day that works for you and anchor activities to particular things in your environment/which you do each day or particular times of day which can act as cues (e.g lunchtime, when you open your laptop on the morning).

Good habits often have the same cues as bad ones so in order to change a bad habit, we can’t control the cues; we have to also keep the same (or a similar) reward - as our brain responds to these - but change the routine that delivers it into a good habit instead. The hard part of this is understanding the rewards and cues that are really driving those habits. at what times do you snack unhealthily? Is it always at certain times of day, when you’re bored/stressed or immediately after meals? What is the reward that comes - is it the sugar rush (or is it the natural break that comes from going to buy the snack)? Once you’ve identified the reward, there may be other ways to achieve something similar (or better) - such as exercising, socialising without snacks or listening to music. In the Power of Habit, Duhigg explains that this even applies to addictions; groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous focus on helping participants find other things to relieve the triggers causing them to drink (e.g religion and social group interactions).

This knowledge is profound and the real power of it is in its simplicity. But as I found over the past couple of months trying to implement it, it’s not necessarily easy.

The idea that has resonated most with me is driving change through self-identity rather than pure discipline or trying to aim at lofty goals. As an example, contributing to the technical community is a habit that I’ve purposely developed over time - the cue is the desire to learn, grow and help others and the reward is the fulfillment of these desires. But this hasn’t always been enough motivation to continue doing what is essentially unpaid work-related activities on evenings and weekends. Microsoft looks to provide recognition for community leaders through the MVP program and whilst this is a good motivator, to make it the reason you do the community activity is misguided - once you are awarded the recognition the commitment level only increases and if you’re not doing it because being a community leader is genuinely part of your identity, and you crave the benefits you get from it, then you have no motivation to continue!

What I’ve found that I struggle the most with, though, is prioritising specific habits to develop over a period of time and devoting the required attention (not just time) to them. A two-minute starter habit to run each day doesn’t require much time commitment but it does require you to focus your attention on doing the activity each day; i.e not forgetting or de-prioritising it amidst the barrage of other things going on in your head at the same time. Technology can help with reminders - even if you don’t get home at the same time each day you can set up location-based reminders - though I found that when that alarm went off it was rare that I still responded to it recognising that going for a jog was the most important thing I needed to be doing at that moment.

Managing attention is a large topic in itself and one that is well covered in Chris Bailey’s book, Hyperfocus. In it, he explains that our brains are wired to be distracted by novel things (for our own safety back in hunter-gatherer days!) - in the modern world this translates into being distracted by email notifications, a desire to browse the web or check social media accounts when we should actually be focusing on writing a presentation. The limitless supply of distractions and instant gratifications that the internet and smartphones have given us make managing attention more of a challenge though also considerably more important.

There are four main techniques to manage attention that I have picked up from Chris Bailey and Dave Allen, the author of Getting Things Done (GTD):

• Awareness: set a reminder on your phone at, say, the top of each hour to notice where your attention is and where it has wavered to (or not) over the past 60 minutes; this will let you notice what you are distracted by and you can then put measures in place to deal with it (e.g leaving your phone in another room or deleting certain apps from it!)
• Scatter focus/Getting everything down: Chris Bailey describes Scatterfocus as the flip-side of Hyperfocus; it’s time that you allow your mind to wander and come up with creative ideas to deal with all the stuff going on in your life. Both authors suggest writing all of these down to get them out of your head - taking half an hour once a week, letting your thoughts flow and writing down all the things you need to deal with.
• Closing the open loops: Once you have this list of things to deal with, you then need to maintain a task list of specific actions against each project (work and personal related - however small/trivial) and track these. The main purpose here is to not keep them flowing around in your head - everything you need to do is organised into a system that you can refer to. Given that much of the time my attention is in my head thinking about all the things I need to do, this is a technique that has definitely helped me!
• Meditation: Rather than this just being a spiritual practice, it is a technique for practicing focusing your attention on something trivial such as breathing. Given that you breathe so automatically that it doesn’t require any of your attention, once you start to focus on it your mind will start to try and take advantage of that on that additional spare attentional capacity and start to wander. Being in control of your mind and bringing your attention back to what you want it to focus on is a skill that is worth developing and can start to be applied at work and home to focus on what you need to and be present in the moment.

So this is what I want to develop in 2020 - the skills of managing attention and focusing on a handful of habits to develop (both personal and work-related) which I can devote the required attention to.

As an aside, Charles Duhigg also devotes a large portion of the book to talking about organisational and societal habits - e.g how a focus on developing the right habits/culture in an organisation can help to improve morale and performance even in areas that are not directly linked to the habits in question.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences on this topic- how have you managed to develop good habits? Please leave comments and let's continue the conversation!