An Effortless Approach To Making Habits Stick: Fraction Habits
Whether we take on a new challenge, want a new change, create a new habit, or wish to develop a specific skill set depends entirely on our approach.
Our approach towards starting can often define the very success of our commitment towards excellence.
Many of us view excellence as a BIG challenge that we have to condition ourselves to, or worse, something that you HAVE to do.
But what if instead, we didn’t overwhelm ourselves and tried a different approach.
Let’s start at the beginning.
If you truly want to see a change in your life, you have already taken the first step -you have made a decision that this is what you really want.
All that remains is to take action.
The first step is you have to say that you can. ~Will Smith
How you start is a good indicator of how you will continue.
If you scramble to finish everything all at once, more than likely you will burn out fast, and ultimately give up on your long term goals.
But if you take a slower approach to starting and pace yourself, you will eventually develop a routine of the specific skill set.
This behavior will be repeated throughout your goals, and all you will be doing is simply adding to your already established behavior – allowing you to persist and ultimately meet your own goals.
My Fraction Habits
For the past few months I have been working on establishing a morning routine for myself.
I’ve decided to model this behavior as many successful people such as CEO’s, entrepreneurs, artists, and athletes put a focus towards the start of their day.
Drew Canole said: “How you start your day is how you start your life.”
So I created a routine based around my goals of: getting more accomplished throughout the day, a sharper mind, clarity, and more importantly being able to build momentum every single day.
In total, I wanted to do 8 tasks every single morning – that’s was my ideal routine.
And so, I wrote them down and followed thoroughly every morning. This lasted roughly for about 2-3 weeks, afterwards it became too overwhelming which lead to stop completely.
But then I had an Eureka moment.
If my routine consists of 8 individual tasks, why not start with only one task each morning (easy enough), and repeat daily until that specific task is ingrained into my routine.
Once that task is established, I could move onto the next task, and so on.
That’s when I understood the sheer significance and simplicity of fraction-habits.
Your Action Plan
A fraction habit is taking your full habit, change, challenge or desired goal/accomplishment, and segmenting it into fractions.
Once you have sectioned it, you can focus on parts of each habit until the behavior becomes repetitive.
And once it has become a part of your daily routine, you can start the next fraction of your habit.
Take for example if you want to start exercising as a habit.
Instead of taking on multiple commitments, worrying about exercising enough, eating correctly, and being physically active every day, try taking a little step in the right direction.
If your goal is to exercise 30 minutes per day.
Now take that 30 minutes and segment it into fractions.
Think of the easiest amount of time you can commit to every single day, without any excuse – no matter how small.
So if you can do 15 minutes a day, then you are committing to half of a habit. Or if you only want to do 5 minutes a day, then segment your habit into sixths.
Fraction Wheel
Once your fraction habit can be repeated daily, move onto the next fraction until you have completed your full habit.
Take action with what you can, no matter how small; you cannot start with what you wish you had.
This isn’t about establishing a full habit right away.
This isn’t about being a monster habit machine.
It’s about taking the first step in the right direction regardless of how small.
You can even think of fraction habits as individual steps.
Every step you take, you get closer to your habit.
Making progress to each fraction until you are going in the right direction. You will gain your momentum, and succeed in your new self habit!
And in the many wise words of Lao Tzu, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
Over to you: What are you going to be working on? What change do you want to see come to life? How are you going to break it into fractions? Let me know in the comments, and anything else you may have to add!
This post originially appeared on Selfhabit: https://selfhabit.com/fraction-habits-an-effortless-approach-to-making-habits-stick/