It seems impossible to break bad habits or create new positive ones. Most people have an ineffective approach. They try to be cool and rely on willpower to force the necessary changes.
You already know this won't work unless you're highly motivated, and motivation itself isn't always there every day, maybe today it's motivated but not necessarily for tomorrow and so on.
Create new habits more effectively by avoiding the most common mistakes:
1. Changing too much, too fast
New habits are best done in small steps. If you want to spend two hours each day writing your novel, start with one sentence each day. One sentence accomplishes something interesting: it gets you in the habit of sitting down and writing when it's time to write. That's the most important first step.
- Start with small changes. Then increase the amount of time and effort as the initial habit is established.
- Look for behavior changes that are so easy, you are impossible to fail.
2. Rely on self-discipline
If your habits require self-discipline, they won't last long. At most, self-discipline is only required to make a habit of starting out. Habits are automatic. Self-discipline is not required to eat candy or watch TV for most of us. If you have a habit of going to the movies, self-discipline is not required for that either.
- Self-discipline is a short-term solution.
- Look for very easy behavior changes, you don't need self-discipline.
3. Expect new habits to be easy to implement
Change is not easy. You will become complacent and lazy if you expect new habits to be easy to implement. We'd all be rich, fit, and speak five languages if creating new habits were a simple thing.
4. Expecting new habits is difficult to implement
The converse is also true. If you expect the process to be incredibly difficult, you will struggle too. The thought of doing something difficult can be reason enough to never start.
- New behaviors are easy to implement if you start slowly and have patience. It moved forward slowly and had a tough temper.
5. Relying too much on information
Our society is blessed, or cursed, with access to information overload. This can create two challenges:
- It's easy to believe you don't know enough to take the first step. There's always something out there that you don't know about. The need to know everything before starting can get you stuck. There is no prize for knowing the most. However, there is great success in doing your best.
- The belief that knowledge alone is enough is just as dangerous. You may know how to do push-ups, but it won't give you the same results as doing 100 push-ups every day.
- Special forces have a motto that 60% is enough to take action. If you know 60% of the relevant information, you know enough to move forward. You can figure out the other 40% along the way. Spend 90% of your time doing and 10% learning.
Eliminating your negative habits and adding new, supportive ones is the key to changing your circumstances. Unfortunately, our instincts about change are not correct.
Small changes are easy to implement and build on. But this approach requires patience and faith that it can work. Remember: small changes add up to big results.