Habit Building101

‘You are what you do’

What you repeatedly do (what you spend time thinking about and doing each day), shapes your personality, beliefs and ultimately forms the person you become.

In last week’s post, I spoke about forgetting the concept of ‘motivation’ and cultivating discipline. Cultivating discipline involves a few simple steps which starts from creating small, small habits and eventually building them up into healthy, sustainable ones. These then become lifestyle changes which are silently integrated into your life - and low and behold: this habit is now part and parcel of your everyday life! Sometimes, it even comes to a point where you feel a little ‘off’ or guilty for doing / not doing the task!

What are habits?

‘Let's define habits. Habits are the small decisions you make and actions you perform every day and account for about 40 percent of our behaviours on any given day. 

Your life today is essentially the sum of your habits. How in shape or out of shape you are? How happy or unhappy you are? How successful or unsuccessful you are? All these are result of your habits.’

- James Clear, Atomic Habits

Okay, let’s build these habits then!

But with every valiant effort to change or create a new habit, people always go with similar approaches like ‘GO BIG OR GO HOME’ or ‘ALL OR NOTHING’.

What most people tend to do is that they set really big, difficult and unachievable goals for themselves. Their want for change is more of a ‘knee-jerk’ reaction to something they are unhappy about.

For example, if they are feeling overweight, they will dedicate themselves to be able to run a marathon in 1 month, and instantly cutting off sugar till they lose the weight. But really, is this actually do-able or sustainable? Most people give up after 3 days, because let’s be honest, a drastic change like that takes enormous willpower and motivation (and as we all know, it clearly does not work).

So how can we properly create them?

Consider the Big Picture: Goals & Grit

‘Perseverance + Passion for Long Term Goals = GRIT’

Before getting down to the nitty gritty details, let’s zoom out and take a look at the bigger picture. It all goes back to your goals and your ‘why’ (purpose).

Goals should:

• be INSPIRED by felt experiences.

• have MEANINGFUL parameters

• be fueled by an AUTHENTIC need to weather you the period of time (ie. ‘suffering’ as per my previously blog post)

• be strong enough to FORTIFY you against distractions, excuses and doubt

All big goals take TIME and SUSTAINED EFFORT to complete. Therefore, it makes sense for the goal to be meaningful. If it’s not meaningful, then what is the purpose? Are you just wasting more time on stuff that doesn’t matter to you? This is something only YOU can define for yourself because this differs from person to person. Need some help finding your why? Check out my youtube video on ‘Finding your purpose in life’.

Recall that in my previous post, that for you to succeed, ‘suffering’ needs to happen. So you need to ask yourself: what’s worth suffering for? Once that’s decided, dedicate yourself to doing it.

Small Picture: Breaking it down

So how do you actually break things down to make doing something easier and actionable?

We’ve already spoken about goals above. The trick here is to continuously break down the tasks at hand into much smaller components, or as Ryder writes in his book ‘The Bullet Journal Method’ - Sprints.

Sprints are small & focused subset goals which add up to become your main goal.

• 3 elements which a SPRINT should have:

  • 1. Make the task SOOOO easy, you can’t say no to doing it! This task should have no barriers / resistance to start!

    • Eg. Aim to run for 10 minutes X3 a week instead of an hour everyday

  • 2. Break sprints further into clearly defined actionable, smaller tasks

    • Run 400m in 10 minutes

  • 3. Have a fixed, relatively short time frame for completion

    • 1 - 2 weeks maximum!

By breaking things down, we make things easier to achieve. Once you have achieved this, you will have a sense of satisfaction and the whole cycle of ‘Action —> Emotional Inspiration —> Motivation —> Action’ (in reference to my previous blog post) will kick start :)

You can also see below the comparison how the ‘traditional model’ works v ‘Sprint Model’ (taken from The Bullet Journal Method)

Consistency Matters, but…

One mistake is just an outlier. Two mistakes is the beginning of a pattern.

We are all human. Shit inevitably happens and life gets in the way, and sometimes we end up not being able to complete what we set out to do. And honestly, that’s alright, skip that session if you need.

Just don’t let it snowball and become a pattern. Nip it in the bud by making sure you don’t miss 2 sessions in a row!

Track Your Progress; Measure your Impact

It’s also really important to make sure you keep a track of progress towards your goal! You can’t measure impact or results without input as well. So make sure you have a way to consistently track your progress - whether its through a notebook, or crossing out days on a calendar. The feeling of checking off the box each day, and finally seeing your progress will help fuel you to keep going! It’s seriously quite cathartic do it :P

Check out the ‘Martin System’ in the youtube video ‘A Better Way To Track Your Habits’ by Thomas Frank (A productivity youtube guru who I follow super closely). I quite like this system he has built and it pretty much is in line with whatever I have mentioned above :)

Conclusion

Building a Habit: Plan of attack

• Visualize the end goal

• Break it down to smaller goals (Sprints & Tasks)

• 95% Consistency and follow through

• Track your progress, see your impact!

Building a habit should not be about temporary fixes, but should be about building up healthy sustainable habits. Once ingrained, your habits won’t even feel like habits anymore. It’ll pretty much be an automatic response, and will feel completely natural. Our behavior won’t actually be guided by our internal goals and motivations anymore, because we won’t even think about it.

Remember, your habits literally make you who you are - so choose what you want to develop wisely!

Reading Resources

Atomic Habits ( Book | Depends on your reading speed ) - James Clear

‘Finding Your Purpose In Life’ - ( Youtube | 11 minute watch ) - Jamie Lim :)

‘Avoid the Second Mistake’ - ( Article | 2 min read ) - James Clear

The Bullet Journal Method - ( Book |Depends on your reading speed) - Ryder Carroll

A Better Way to Track Your Habits ( Youtube | 7 minute watch ) - Thomas Frank