- Joined
- Sep 10, 2007
- Messages
- 63
Just the other day on my weekly phone call back home, I was chatting with Mom and she asked how my coaching business was going, and why I never talk about it to her or teach her any of the material. Hmmmm….it was a good question, but it was easy to answer: "Because you never asked!" I said. "Well, I`m asking now " she said. Touché. So I gave her a few pointers on how to improve her life in certain areas she had concerns about, but one in particular stood out, and it was in the area of procrastination and time management, an area we all struggle with. You see, Mom was getting ready for a garage sale but she`s a bit of a pack rat…well, A LOT of a pack rat! And the thought of going through the piles and piles of stuff she had was daunting, so she kept putting it off.
The strategy I gave her is a game changer and has many applications, so I thought I`d share it here too. The concept is simple…get in the habit of changing your habits! Sounds simple right? Well, only if you do it correctly, and simple is far from easy. It takes determined effort, and you have to be ready to implement it. Otherwise, its just too easy to get off track and back into your old ways again. That`s actually another reason why I didn`t share this with Mom before. If someone doesn`t ask, that often means they aren`t ready to hear the information, or didn`t want to hear it. You know the old saying…."When the student is ready, the teacher appears" ? Some people are actively seeking this kind of stuff out because they WANT to improve (like my Mom), and others are just wandering aimlessly letting Life happen to them instead of them happening to Life.
If you want things to improve, you have to do things you`ve never done before. So here`s what you do. Pick the habit you`re currently struggling with. In Mom`s case, it was procrastination. Commit to doing the new behaviour for 30 days in a row without exception. Studies have shown over and over again that habits are typically formed after 21 days. Lets round that up to 30 just to make sure, and because 30 is the average number of days in a month, it fits very nicely with a monthly timeline. You`ve probably heard something similar like that before, but here`s the key – measure your progress. Peter Drucker, the renowned management expert says that "What gets measured, gets managed." The more you measure something the more likely it will improve because you`re on top of it, plain and simple. It becomes forefront in your mind so you take steps to course-correct along the way if things get side-tracked. To track your new habit, I`ve developed a simple but effective way to measure your progress and keep on track.
Step 1 – Define your new habit specifically. For example, I`m on an ongoing crusade to have exercise as a daily part of my life, and I`ve defined this as doing at least 30 minutes of rigourous exercise every single day without exception. This includes weekends, holidays, weddings, funerals…it doesn`t matter. If its important to you, you`ll do it. For Mom, we discussed what her new habit would be to replace Procrastination, specifically around the garage sale stuff. Since she`s retired, I suggested that her new activity to start her day off in the morning would be to take at least 30 minutes to tackle one of the piles of stuff she had to go through. If she wanted to do more, great. If not, it had to be at least 30 minutes. Doing it at the top of the day (i.e. making it a priority by doing it first) would ensure that even if she did nothing else for the rest of the day, she`d have some satisfaction that she knocked off her most pressing need right now, and feel forward progress and momentum. Her first argument was that she didn`t have the time in the morning, so I asked her what she did during that time. Turns out she`s in the habit of reading the morning paper over breakfast. This takes her from 9-11am! Wow! 2hrs every day of self-imposed bombardment with negativity and sensationalism which are, of course, the main things that make papers sell! She saw the absurdity in this and agreed that it was one of her biggest contributors to Procrastinating, and it was largely an avoidance technique to avoid what really needed getting done. In the end, she agreed to try what I call the 30-Day Habit Formula that I`m describing here.Step 2 -Come up with a single letter abbreviation for the new habit you`re trying to develop. I use "E" for excercise for my current daily exercise habit I`m developing. In my Mom`s case, she might think of a word or simple phrase that represents the new habit to replace Procrastination…perhaps its "Do It Now!" so she might choose "D."
Step 3 – Get a Journal. Keep it by your bedside and before going to sleep each night, write down in point form 5 things that you`re thankful for that day. Showing Gratitude on a regular basis is one of the most powerful things I know to immediately improve the quality of your life! I`ll leave the full discussion on Gratitude for another post, but for now, just know that the journal will serve 2 purposes: i) showing your gratefulness and ii) tracking your habits.
Step 4 – Track your Progress. For each journal entry, in the margin write the date, and below the date write your habit abbreviation followed by the number of days in a row that you`ve successfully done your new habit. For the first entry for Mom, it would be D1 for "Do It Now, Day 1″. Success has to be binary – its either you did it or you didn`t do it, and that`s why your habit has to be very specific. No grey areas allowed for "interpretation," and no cheating…you`d be only cheating yourself. If Mom did at least 30 mins of "pile-sorting" the next day, she would write "D2″ in the journal and so on. Do it seven days in a row and its "D7." Continue in this way until you get to "D30." But here`s the kicker: if you miss just ONE day, you have to start all over again! So if you`re at D17 (or whatever your habit abbreviation is) and you miss a day you have to start at D1 again regardless of the reason you missed! Its built-in incentive, and the Type-A personalities out there who are really competitive will really love this one….it becomes a game, an internal contest with yourself to see how far you can go. This is never possible if you`re not tracking it in the first place and is why most people fail at implementing new habits. In fact, I used this very strategy to get in the habit of writing in my Gratitude Journal on a daily basis….I used "G" for Gratitude, and yes I fell a few times! Its painful when you miss, when you have to start all over again, but you learn from that experience and when I got up to G12 and missed a day, my goal was to beat my last record until I hit G30, and I eventually did. Because of this process, now I can`t even imagine missing a day of my journal! It becomes like brushing your teeth….you just do it out of habit and becomes part of your daily ritual.
Step 5 – Repeat. Once you hit Day 30 and you feel you`ve really, really internalized the new habit, move on to the next one! Define the new behaviour specifically, get your new abbreviation, and start tracking. I`ve successfully used this technique over the years for everything from flossing (I was great at daily brushing but sucked at flossing as a habit), to journaling as mentioned above, to becoming more productive (I stopped reading the paper years ago!), and yes, to getting in the Habit of Changing My Habits (H1 – H30
)
Think about it. If you were really serious about this, you could have a new habit every 30 days. That`s 12 new habits a year. You could transform any area of your Life! Now, chances are you`ll have to reset to the beginning every now and then and start over, taking longer than 30 days per habit. You might get sick, or you`re just not in the habit of forming new habits yet….Life gets in the way, and **** happens. Expect it. Even if it takes you 3 months to internalize a new habit through this process, that`s still a new habit every quarter. That is transformational.
So here`s the challenge.….identify the worst area of your life right now and select something small to change in that area, then implement the 30-Day Habit Formula. There`s 2 key elements of that last instruction that are critical to understand: i) worst area of your life and ii) small change in it. Start with something small so its easy to succeed at it. This will give you incentive to continue, so you won`t get discouraged easily. Let`s say you`re overweight for instance and you`ve tried diet after diet after diet, all without success. You have low self-esteem and your life sucks because of your weight. Here`s what to do about it. Select one thing that you`d like to change in your daily routine regarding your health. It doesn`t have to be as daunting as running for 30 min a day. It can be taking the stairs at work. It can be drinking 6 glasses of water a day. Or replacing the stop at the vending machine with some carrot sticks and hummous. Whatever it is, do it for 30 days in a row without exception, using the simple steps above. Only when you`ve mastered that habit, replace it with the next one on the list in the same life area! When you have this single-minded focus on only one thing, you`re much better at keeping on track, since you only have one thing to manage instead of several and your life WILL change because of it.
There`s a ton of info in this post so I`ll stop for now, but I`d love to hear if this was of value to you. Even more importantly, I`d love to hear what you`re going to DO about it! Use the comments below to publicly state what habit you`re going to change and what day you`re on. Keep visiting with your updates. If you fall off track, let`s hear about that too so we can encourage you! Public delcarations of intent are a very powerful way to help you keep accountable, so lets hear what those are, and here`s to your success in getting in the Habit of Changing your Habits!
(and Thanks Mom for inspiring me to write this in the first place…you continue to be an incredible role model for me and an inspriation in my life…it caused me to start blogging so that I can share this with others in the hopes of making the world a better place
)
The strategy I gave her is a game changer and has many applications, so I thought I`d share it here too. The concept is simple…get in the habit of changing your habits! Sounds simple right? Well, only if you do it correctly, and simple is far from easy. It takes determined effort, and you have to be ready to implement it. Otherwise, its just too easy to get off track and back into your old ways again. That`s actually another reason why I didn`t share this with Mom before. If someone doesn`t ask, that often means they aren`t ready to hear the information, or didn`t want to hear it. You know the old saying…."When the student is ready, the teacher appears" ? Some people are actively seeking this kind of stuff out because they WANT to improve (like my Mom), and others are just wandering aimlessly letting Life happen to them instead of them happening to Life.
If you want things to improve, you have to do things you`ve never done before. So here`s what you do. Pick the habit you`re currently struggling with. In Mom`s case, it was procrastination. Commit to doing the new behaviour for 30 days in a row without exception. Studies have shown over and over again that habits are typically formed after 21 days. Lets round that up to 30 just to make sure, and because 30 is the average number of days in a month, it fits very nicely with a monthly timeline. You`ve probably heard something similar like that before, but here`s the key – measure your progress. Peter Drucker, the renowned management expert says that "What gets measured, gets managed." The more you measure something the more likely it will improve because you`re on top of it, plain and simple. It becomes forefront in your mind so you take steps to course-correct along the way if things get side-tracked. To track your new habit, I`ve developed a simple but effective way to measure your progress and keep on track.
Step 1 – Define your new habit specifically. For example, I`m on an ongoing crusade to have exercise as a daily part of my life, and I`ve defined this as doing at least 30 minutes of rigourous exercise every single day without exception. This includes weekends, holidays, weddings, funerals…it doesn`t matter. If its important to you, you`ll do it. For Mom, we discussed what her new habit would be to replace Procrastination, specifically around the garage sale stuff. Since she`s retired, I suggested that her new activity to start her day off in the morning would be to take at least 30 minutes to tackle one of the piles of stuff she had to go through. If she wanted to do more, great. If not, it had to be at least 30 minutes. Doing it at the top of the day (i.e. making it a priority by doing it first) would ensure that even if she did nothing else for the rest of the day, she`d have some satisfaction that she knocked off her most pressing need right now, and feel forward progress and momentum. Her first argument was that she didn`t have the time in the morning, so I asked her what she did during that time. Turns out she`s in the habit of reading the morning paper over breakfast. This takes her from 9-11am! Wow! 2hrs every day of self-imposed bombardment with negativity and sensationalism which are, of course, the main things that make papers sell! She saw the absurdity in this and agreed that it was one of her biggest contributors to Procrastinating, and it was largely an avoidance technique to avoid what really needed getting done. In the end, she agreed to try what I call the 30-Day Habit Formula that I`m describing here.Step 2 -Come up with a single letter abbreviation for the new habit you`re trying to develop. I use "E" for excercise for my current daily exercise habit I`m developing. In my Mom`s case, she might think of a word or simple phrase that represents the new habit to replace Procrastination…perhaps its "Do It Now!" so she might choose "D."
Step 3 – Get a Journal. Keep it by your bedside and before going to sleep each night, write down in point form 5 things that you`re thankful for that day. Showing Gratitude on a regular basis is one of the most powerful things I know to immediately improve the quality of your life! I`ll leave the full discussion on Gratitude for another post, but for now, just know that the journal will serve 2 purposes: i) showing your gratefulness and ii) tracking your habits.
Step 4 – Track your Progress. For each journal entry, in the margin write the date, and below the date write your habit abbreviation followed by the number of days in a row that you`ve successfully done your new habit. For the first entry for Mom, it would be D1 for "Do It Now, Day 1″. Success has to be binary – its either you did it or you didn`t do it, and that`s why your habit has to be very specific. No grey areas allowed for "interpretation," and no cheating…you`d be only cheating yourself. If Mom did at least 30 mins of "pile-sorting" the next day, she would write "D2″ in the journal and so on. Do it seven days in a row and its "D7." Continue in this way until you get to "D30." But here`s the kicker: if you miss just ONE day, you have to start all over again! So if you`re at D17 (or whatever your habit abbreviation is) and you miss a day you have to start at D1 again regardless of the reason you missed! Its built-in incentive, and the Type-A personalities out there who are really competitive will really love this one….it becomes a game, an internal contest with yourself to see how far you can go. This is never possible if you`re not tracking it in the first place and is why most people fail at implementing new habits. In fact, I used this very strategy to get in the habit of writing in my Gratitude Journal on a daily basis….I used "G" for Gratitude, and yes I fell a few times! Its painful when you miss, when you have to start all over again, but you learn from that experience and when I got up to G12 and missed a day, my goal was to beat my last record until I hit G30, and I eventually did. Because of this process, now I can`t even imagine missing a day of my journal! It becomes like brushing your teeth….you just do it out of habit and becomes part of your daily ritual.
Step 5 – Repeat. Once you hit Day 30 and you feel you`ve really, really internalized the new habit, move on to the next one! Define the new behaviour specifically, get your new abbreviation, and start tracking. I`ve successfully used this technique over the years for everything from flossing (I was great at daily brushing but sucked at flossing as a habit), to journaling as mentioned above, to becoming more productive (I stopped reading the paper years ago!), and yes, to getting in the Habit of Changing My Habits (H1 – H30
Think about it. If you were really serious about this, you could have a new habit every 30 days. That`s 12 new habits a year. You could transform any area of your Life! Now, chances are you`ll have to reset to the beginning every now and then and start over, taking longer than 30 days per habit. You might get sick, or you`re just not in the habit of forming new habits yet….Life gets in the way, and **** happens. Expect it. Even if it takes you 3 months to internalize a new habit through this process, that`s still a new habit every quarter. That is transformational.
So here`s the challenge.….identify the worst area of your life right now and select something small to change in that area, then implement the 30-Day Habit Formula. There`s 2 key elements of that last instruction that are critical to understand: i) worst area of your life and ii) small change in it. Start with something small so its easy to succeed at it. This will give you incentive to continue, so you won`t get discouraged easily. Let`s say you`re overweight for instance and you`ve tried diet after diet after diet, all without success. You have low self-esteem and your life sucks because of your weight. Here`s what to do about it. Select one thing that you`d like to change in your daily routine regarding your health. It doesn`t have to be as daunting as running for 30 min a day. It can be taking the stairs at work. It can be drinking 6 glasses of water a day. Or replacing the stop at the vending machine with some carrot sticks and hummous. Whatever it is, do it for 30 days in a row without exception, using the simple steps above. Only when you`ve mastered that habit, replace it with the next one on the list in the same life area! When you have this single-minded focus on only one thing, you`re much better at keeping on track, since you only have one thing to manage instead of several and your life WILL change because of it.
There`s a ton of info in this post so I`ll stop for now, but I`d love to hear if this was of value to you. Even more importantly, I`d love to hear what you`re going to DO about it! Use the comments below to publicly state what habit you`re going to change and what day you`re on. Keep visiting with your updates. If you fall off track, let`s hear about that too so we can encourage you! Public delcarations of intent are a very powerful way to help you keep accountable, so lets hear what those are, and here`s to your success in getting in the Habit of Changing your Habits!
(and Thanks Mom for inspiring me to write this in the first place…you continue to be an incredible role model for me and an inspriation in my life…it caused me to start blogging so that I can share this with others in the hopes of making the world a better place