Leveraging Habits To Change Your Life - Part One

—Chelsea B. Ashworth

Note:  You’ve probably heard the saying “Change your habits and you can change your life.”  It’s true; enhancing your habits can be a great way to achieve your personal and professional goals.  And when teams adopt strong habits, it can lead to stronger cultures.  That’s why we often find ourselves talking with teams about habits.  For this week’s post, Chelsea B. Ashworth shares some of what she’s learned from one of the best books on the topic of habits: James Clear’s Atomic Habits.

James Clear has a passion for self-improvement and optimization via habit engineering. I recently listened to his book Atomic Habits on Audible and I was spellbound. I wrote so many notes that I'm actually going to divide this article into two parts. In Part One, I want to share Clear's four laws of habit building, which he believes are key to making change.   

1) Make It Obvious.

Clear believes that the process of behavior change begins with awareness. He suggests making a behavior scorecard, in which you list your daily habits and then rate each habit as being good, bad, or neutral. The purpose of the scorecard is to bring your attention to your existing habits and the cues (like a box of candy on a table or a packed gym bag near the door) that trigger them. With that knowledge, you can make a plan to eliminate bad habits and start new, more beneficial habits.

Once you know a new habit you'd like to develop, Clear suggests setting what he calls "Implementation Intentions." You set an implementation intention by making a specific plan about how you will carry out your new habit. If you want to make a habit of cooking more often, your implementation intention might be to start making dinner at 6PM each weeknight. By setting this intention, you make the time and location of your new habit so obvious that with enough repetition, you will find yourself automatically performing the new habit. The specificity of the implementation intention helps you establish a rhythm with your new habit that might not otherwise occur if you just resolved to cook more. Clear is a huge advocate for automation, and using implementation intentions helps reserve your brain power for more important tasks than sitting around trying to decide if you want to cook tonight.

Clear encourages the use of a specific kind of implementation intention that he calls "Habit Stacking." With habit stacking, instead of setting a time and location for a new habit, you try to piggyback a new habit to an existing habit. In other words, your existing habit becomes a cue for you to perform your new habit. His formula is "After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT]." You could habit stack by resolving to send a message to a friend or relative each morning after having coffee, or planning to read after brushing your teeth each night. By pairing a new habit with an existing habit, you make the cue for your new habit obvious and automatic. 

2) Make It Attractive.

To make a habit attractive, Clear suggests a strategy called "Temptation Bundling." The idea is to think of an activity you already enjoy, and then connect it with a new habit that you want to adopt. For instance, if you love to read but want to make a habit of going to the gym, decide that you are only allowed to do leisure reading while on a treadmill or elliptical machine. By linking a new habit with an activity you already enjoy, you will increase feelings of positive association and be more likely to stick with the new habit. 

Clear points out that it's a lot easier to adopt a new habit that provides some sort of positive sensory experience, like buying hand soap that smells nice to encourage hand washing. When trying to start a new habit, consider whether you can make the task more pleasurable to your senses. If the pre-workout powder you bought tastes gross, you're not likely to drink it before heading to the gym. Toss it out and buy one that tastes better, and you'll be more likely to stick with the habit. 

3) Make It Easy.

Clear uses a "Two-Minute Rule" to make new habits feel more manageable. The Two-Minute Rule states "When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do." You want to make a new habit feel as easy as possible to start, so rather than focusing on some grand end goal, try to break down the steps needed to get there and start with a new, easy, two-minute habit. If you aspire to be an author, instead of focusing on trying to write a book, start by making a goal of writing on a topic of your choice for two minutes once a day. You want to create an easy gateway habit that can naturally lead to increased productivity. In Clear's words, "You must standardize before you can optimize."

4) Make It Satisfying.

To keep motivated to maintain a new habit, the habit has to yield some form of satisfaction. Clear uses "Habit Tracking" to fulfill that need. One interesting example he gives involves paper clips. You start with a jar full of, let's say 20 paper clips, and an empty jar beside it. If you want to create a habit of reading 20 new cases or journal articles a month, move one paper clip over to the empty jar each time you read a case or article. Seeing the once empty jar fill with paper clips as you get the reading done will provide some tangible evidence of the progress you are making, which often feels so elusive. If you don't want to become "the paper clip guy" at work, you could use a calendar to habit track. Placing an "X" on each day that you perform a new habit can also scratch that itch while helping you maintain momentum by encouraging you not to break the chain of progress.   

Whenever possible, use automated means of habit tracking. Many people like to use apps linked to their financial accounts to track spending. Apple watches and Fitbits can provide detailed information about your physical activity. You can set a calendar reminder to review automated information however often you feel is useful. 

Modern technology provides tons of ways to check your habit activity, but you could certainly go old school like Benjamin Franklin, who apparently used to carry a booklet to keep track of virtues he valued. Clear does caution that manual tracking should be limited to only your most important habits and you should record your activity immediately upon completion. Reliably tracking one habit is more beneficial than sporadically tracking 10 habits. 

That's it for Part One. Come back for Part Two, where I'll share more of Clear's tips that I think will be very helpful to anyone contemplating a job change.

In the meantime, if you'd like to learn more about James Clear, you can check out his website. Click here to see more tips on establishing new habits. This ApochroMinute has 3 strategies for adopting new habits.

If you or your team can benefit from enhancing your habits, Apochromatik can help.

 To purchase a copy of Atomic Habits, click here.

Chelsea B. Ashworth is currently a licensed attorney in Nashville, Tennessee. When not lawyering, Chelsea uses her writing and editing skills to chase the greatest high she can think of: being understood. She is looking for new opportunities to bring clarity to messaging and deliver content that is clear, concise, and conveys confidence. Watch for future posts from Chelsea as she continues her career exploration.