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The Healthy Habit Revolution: Create Better Habits in 5 Minutes a Day, by Derek Doepker
WHETHER you work for yourself or for a company, you work for yourself. As such, your ability to use your aptitude and your skills is based solely on your personal effectiveness.
Habits are “tax free”. Once you have them, they cost nothing in terms of emotional energy, and effort.
Much has been written about habits, among the best of which is The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, reviewed in this column in 2012. Habits, he explains, work through a cycle of cue, routine and reward.
READ: The Power of Habit
The cue may be the feeling of nervousness, the routine is eating junk food, the reward is feeling calmer. Changing the routine to, for example, a few minutes of mindful breathing with your eyes closed might produce the same reward – feeling calmer. Ending a bad habit by substituting a good one produces the same emotional reward without the downside.
Doepker’s contribution to the subject of habits is the focus on creating good habits rather than addressing bad ones. The approach that Doepker takes is one that does not need much willpower or motivation to achieve success.
“When I wanted to develop the habit of meditation,” he explains, “I set a target of 30 seconds of meditation each day. I knew that I could follow through with this without fail, every day, no matter how crazy that day was. In fact, it was so easy it would almost hurt my pride not to do it.”
This is the basis of what Doekper calls a “micro-habit”. It entails performing an action that will propel you in the right direction, so you can improve as you progress.
Establishing a routine is the immediate, critical step. The routine is more important at first than the results. It may take days, weeks, or months for the routine to become a habit, but you will eventually have an almost effortless, good habit. At first, consistency trumps all else.
The beauty of the approach is that it relies only on the smallest amount of willpower to get started.
Any necessary work activity can become a habit: replying to work correspondence the same day, keeping abreast of industry issues, making notes immediately after all meetings, and so on.
Ensuring that you do the micro-habit is often aided by a signal that it is to be done now. An aural cue might be an alarm that it is 04:45, indicating that you need to start replying to the day’s correspondence. Besides sensory reminders such visual (sticky notes to yourself) or aural cues, it helps to tie a new habit to something you already do daily. Since you commute to and from work each day, you could save returning calls for this time so that the commute becomes the cue.
If you find yourself forgetting once a week or more, you need to question whether the issue is that important to you.
Doepker compares significant issues that are forgotten to breaking a diet plan. The usual response to the realisation that you ate really badly over the past few days is that you might as well indulge through the weekend and start afresh next week.
“If you missed a shower one day, would you wait until next week to start taking showers again?” he asks. Habits need to be more like showers than diets. Get back on track fast!
The language that we use when thinking about habits, matters. Dieters who use restrictive phrases such as “I can’t” make a healthier choice 39% of the time. Those who think “I don’t”, which is more empowering because it represents making a choice, made a healthier choice 64% of the time.
Choice rather than compulsion
Thinking that reflects a conscious choice rather than a compulsion is what you are doing anyway - making a choice. “I do not go home without replying to at least one piece of correspondence,” is more effective than “I have to reply to correspondence before going home”.
Success is often impaired by setting too many mini-habits. You cannot do everything at once, but you can do one thing at a time.
There are three words to effortlessly overcome what may otherwise overwhelm you. “Can I just do…?” Doepker gives this example: “Let’s say I don’t feel like doing an hour-long workout. I can ask, ‘Can I just do the warmup'?”
Instead of trying to get motivation, try to get momentum. The motivation will follow naturally for any important issue.
Choosing something small and easy, the mini-habit, gives you a way of not having to be perfect, and still making progress towards a strong habit.
Once you get going, you often want to keep on going. By reducing the habit, you get started so that you can later add and upgrade, and keep growing.
An effective and very simple method.
Readability: Light -+--- Serious
Insights: High -+--- Low
Practical: High +---- Low
*Ian Mann of Gateways consults internationally on leadership and strategy and is the author of Strategy that Works. Views expressed are his own.
