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From Bethany: With 2023 less than a month underway, I thought this could be a great podcast to summarize. James Clear is the author of one of my favorite books, Atomic Habits. He has a great way of explaining how to make changes in your life in a way that is manageable and sustainable. If you've never read Atomic Habits, do yourself a favor and pick up a copy -- and read this post as a helpful introduction (or refresher) on the concepts he teaches. If you want to grow and improve as a human being, this post is for you.
1-paragraph summary
Habits are the drivers of how you go about your days, your weeks, your months, and your years. It's crucial to be intentional about incrementally harnessing their power in the direction you want to go if you want to improve your life. Habits -- whether good or bad -- are formed through the following process: cue, craving, response, and reward. Understanding this process allows you to intervene in the feedback loop to break bad habits and build new ones.
Key takeaways
Why habits are so important
Habits allow you to solve the problems of life with the least expenditure of energy -- they are automations or mental shortcuts so that, for example, you don't have to waste precious energy learning how to tie your shoe every single time you do it.
Habits are a double-edged sword - they can either work for you or against you. It's crucial to be aware of how your habits are serving you and how to make them work for you in order to make any kind of progress in your life.
Most of your results are a lagging measure of the habits that led up to them. We often think we need a different outcome (i.e., a bigger bank account), but what we really need are better habits that will lead to the outcome we want (i.e., better spending and saving habits). Outcome goals are useful in that they provide clarity regarding the direction you want to go, but once you've set those goals, you need to focus instead on the daily systems and habits that lead to where you want to go.
Example: Goal=write a bestselling book. System=how you research, your daily writing habits, your process of editing, etc.
Every action is a vote for the type of person you want to become. Decide what you want your identity to be, then start building up enough proof to yourself by taking actions that type of person would take.
Example: you want to be the type of person who works out every day, so you start by just casting votes in that direction - you do a single pushup every day until it becomes a habit that you can then build on.
A habit has to be established before it can be improved. Just master the art of showing up, then you can worry about optimizing.
Usually, good habits have a cost in the present moment and positive benefits accrue only later on. Bad habits usually feel good in the moment but the negative benefits show up later.
"You don't rise to the level of your goals; you fall to the level of your systems."
Turning your passion into a career
Everybody wants to do something great - build a business, write a book, win a championship - but most people fail at those goals because they haven't fallen in love with the tedious work that produces those outcomes. If your dream is to write a book, you have to be fascinated by the process of researching and exploring a topic, writing and editing and re-writing, etc. If the process feels like fun, rather than a chore that you have to muster precious willpower to do, then you have a much better shot at excelling.
The Internet has allowed there to be an infinite number of niches, which opens up possibilities for every single person to find that subject that you're both naturally skilled at and that feels like fun. Align ambition with ability to truly excel....and with any luck, you'll find a willing market for your passion and be able to make a job out of this endeavor!
If you haven't found that niche yet, think about an idea called the explore-exploit tradeoff. Early on in a project, career, etc., explore far and wide to try different avenues. But as time goes on, you need to start exploiting the best option you've found so far and narrow down. But even if you're in the "exploit" stage, it can still be useful to dedicate 10% of your time toward exploring new avenues.
The habit building process
The process of how habits are formed can be summarized as: cue, craving, response, and reward.
Cue=something that gets your attention (i.e., you see a plate of cookies on the counter).
Craving=an individual desire dependent on how you interpret the cue (i.e., you've had cookies before and know they're sweet and yummy, so you want the cookie).
Response=the action or habit (i.e., eating the cookie)
Reward=the result of the action to close the feedback loop - if you got pleasure or a successful feeling from doing the action, your brain will learn to do that action again next time the cue occurs (i.e., the cookie was delicious as predicted, which will reinforce that habit loop for next time).
How to build a good habit:
Make it obvious (cue).
Example: put healthy food in an obvious place on the counter instead of the crisper drawer in the fridge.
Make it attractive and appealing (craving).
Example: set an appointment with your friend to run each morning instead of trying to do the run by yourself.
Make it easy and convenient (response).
Example: scale the habit you want to do down to something that takes 2 minutes or less -- read 1 page of a book every day rather than try to read a whole book each week.
Make it satisfying and enjoyable once you've done the action (reward).
Example: have a jar of marbles where 90 are blue and 10 are red. Every time you do the habit you're trying to build, take a marble out of the jar. If it's blue, nothing happens. But if it's red, you get to reward yourself with something special.
How to break a bad habit:
Make it invisible (cue).
Example: to watch less TV, make the TV less central in the room and make books more central.
Make it unattractive (craving).
Example: research the negative effects of eating gluten to start building negative associations with bread - this should eventually change how you feel when you see a loaf of bread and change your craving into an aversion.
Make it difficult (response).
Example: delete the Instagram app off your phone so that every time you want to use it, you have to re-download it and log in again.
Make it unsatisfying (response).
Example: add a consequence to the action. If you've arranged with your friend to meet them for an early morning run, you add a consequence to sleeping in - you let down your friend.
Top Practical Applications
From Bethany: Pinpoint a bad habit you'd like to break, or a good habit you'd like to build. Pick one point of intervention from the "How to Build a Good Habit" or "How to Break a Bad Habit" sections above, and work to implement it on a daily basis for at least 2 weeks. Pay attention to how this intervention affects the habit you're looking to build or break.
If you need help with this process, this is exactly what I do when coaching clients one-on-one. I help you pinpoint the bad habits that are negatively affecting your health and the good habits that can start moving you in the right direction, and help you develop an action plan for dealing with those habits in a steady, sustainable way.
If you think you might be interested in one-on-one health coaching with me, book a free 15-minute call by clicking the button below:
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