"Like the rubber or anchor on a ship, your habits can guide you in the direction of your dreams or hold you back and keep you from achieving them."
– Mensah Oteh
Habits are automatic behaviors that are hard to give up because they become hardwired in our brain. The habits that dictate our daily actions can be either beneficial or potentially detrimental to our well-being and have most likely come about unintentionally from various things we've learned and repeated on our life journey. When we want to make purposeful changes to these well-established habits, it takes a bit of know-how to outsmart the brain and retrain it to learn and adapt to something new.
Gaining a bit of knowledge about the power of habits and establishing new, more positive ones in your life may not be easy, but entirely possible with a few tactical aids at your disposal. Although there are many ways to create new habits, here is one tip to help make new behaviors stick:
Use the habit stacking method to attach new and unfamiliar behaviors to older, well-established anchor habits.
What is an anchor habit? The Harvard Pilgrim, Health Care website describes anchor habits as "small, core routines that are ingrained within us like getting up each day or, for some, exercising. Once you have an anchor habit, it's also easier to continue adding to your routine and achieving more."
In the book Atomic Habits by James Clear, the practice of habit stacking helps us incorporate new behaviors by attaching them to well-established automatic habits already hardwired into our brain. We have a better chance of repeating the desired new behavior regularly and building strong brain neuron connections to make the new behavior as automatic as the old one.
In his book, Tiny Habits, BJ Fogg, a behavior scientist at Stanford University, also explains a specific formula for stacking new habits to well-established ones, including specific language that clarifies particular behavior change goals. An example of habit stacking practice would be, "Every morning, after I brush my teeth (anchor habit), I will do ten push-ups against the bathroom counter (specific new action)."
The key to success is to follow through with your action consistently every day until you do it without thinking about it.
How do you take this technique and apply it to your 2022 improvement goals?
Here are a few simple things you can do to practice the habit stacking method for yourself:
Step 1: Observe – To be specific about what we want to change, we need to know what we currently do. Therefore, it's essential to begin taking stock of the beneficial habits you already do every day. Here are a few questions about your morning routine that may help you get started.
When and how do you wake up in the morning?
Do you get up at the same time every morning?
Do you use an alarm or get up naturally?
What is your wake-up habit?
Do you hit the snooze button several times before getting out of bed or get out of bed at the sound of the alarm?
Do you grab your phone and hang out in bed scrolling through social media and checking text and emails, or sit in a chair and read for an hour while enjoying a morning cup of joe?
What happens next?
There is no right or wrong "thing to be doing" here or need for any judgment about what you do. All you are doing is collecting the facts, and that is it!
Dissect your morning routine with a fine-tooth comb and review every detail about what you are doing between the time you wake up and get out the door or begin your very first physical activity.
These habitual first daily actions are called your morning routine and are influential in setting the tone for your entire day. This awareness is essential when you stack new positive behaviors to well-established routines to improve your success rate.
Step 2: Decide - After slicing and dicing your morning routine into separate actions, you want to decide on the behavior changes you want to make. I recommend breaking your long-term BIG vision into simple to accomplish tiny daily activities.
Humans typically overestimate and overwhelm themselves with too much all at once and end up doing nothing. This all-or-nothing thinking does not serve us well; therefore, consider the power of small, consistent daily commitments toward change. You will accomplish more over time when you can do one small thing every day versus one big thing now and then. Take advantage of going consistently small, go easy on yourself, and choose one thing to focus on at a time.
Step 3: Get specific and put your plan into action - Now that you've overserved and decided on one thing you can add every day, it's time for action!
When you are incorporating new steps into your daily routine with the expectation of making it habitual or automatic, you want to be very specific about the action you plan to take. Please provide details about the particular activity and the particular time and place you want to do it. Specific language while planning to add new behaviors sounds like this…." I will (action you plan to do) (exact time and placement of further action) before or after (established positive habit)."
Step 4: Track your success! - The best way to stay on track is to measure consistency. As a subscriber of this newsletter, you received a 2022 Habit stacking and Goal Setting Workbook; use the monthly tracker to keep track of your monthly consistency. Don't have the workbook? Send us an email, and we'll get it out to you.
Now... Let's do this!!!!
Go through the steps of observing, deciding, and planning for action, and follow through with your plan. Track your consistency on the monthly Habit Stacking and Goal Setting planner, and send us an email to join one of our Inspiration Clubs to help hold you accountable to your one positive small focus step!
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