If you want to make this year a great year and have basically been setting the same resolutions each year, perhaps it's time to do something a bit different. Instead of focusing on a resolution, focus on developing the right habits.
One of the reasons why many people give up on their goals is because of disappointments, they don't get the results they were expecting fast enough. This could be due to a lot of things such as an unrealistic timeline or circumstances not within their control. If you instead focus on developing habits that will lead to the accomplishment of your goals, the results will be completely under your control. You'll either follow through or you won't. The beauty of it all is that once the habits are developed, it'll just be matter of time before you reach your goals.
For example, instead of setting the goal of losing 50 pounds, focus on developing the habits of exercise and proper diet. When those habits are a part of your everyday life, not only will it become easier as time goes by, you'll also keep the weight off as well. This is the power of habits, whether good or bad, the actions are near automatic.
If you can align those habitual actions towards an outcome that you want, slowly but surely, your life will change.
So drop the resolutions and pick up some good habits.
Eat Radishes but Stay Away from Those Cookies
“Control yourself!” People say it to you and you say it to other people. More important, you say it to yourself.
Sometimes, most of the time in fact, you control yourself. Other times
it’s difficult, if not impossible, to reign yourself in. You find it
hard to stop doing whatever it is that you’re doing. You might be
talking too much, eating too much, or watching too much Doctor
Who—though that might not be possible. Why is that? Why can you
sometimes control yourself and sometimes not? Why can’t you control
yourself all the time?
Your Will-Power is Limited
Your
will-power is limited. You only have so much of it and, when you’ve
used most of it up, controlling yourself gets hard. When your will-power
is low, you’re like a hungry dog let loose in a gourmet kibble shop.
How do we know this? Picture yourself in a psychology study:
Radishes and Cookies
You
are a student at a mid-Western university. One evening, you are phoned
by an experimenter. She is studying people’s preferences for various
foods. You’ll be taste-testing. “Wow,” you think to yourself, “extra
credit and taste-testing? I love psychology!”
The
next morning, the friendly experimenter escorts you into her
laboratory. The smell of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies overwhelms
you. The experimenter seats you at a table. In front of you are a plate
of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies.
Your stomach is growling. There is also a plate of radishes.
The experimenter asks you to taste-test the radishes. You are not to taste the cookies. In fact, don’t even touch them! No cookies for you! She leaves you alone in the room. You dutifully taste the radishes and resist the urge to grab a handful of cookies. In fact, you go through the entire session without touching a single cookie. Good for you!
Upon
her return, the experimenter says, “I wonder if I can ask you a favour.
A friend of mine is having trouble recruiting subjects for his study on
solving puzzles. Could you help him out?” “Sure, why not?” you say
agreeably. She introduces you to the second experimenter. He takes you
to his lab and gives you your instructions: You are to trace a complex
figure without lifting your pen off of the paper or doubling back on
yourself. If you do either of those things, you have to start over. You
are to continue until you solve the puzzle or give up. He starts a
stopwatch as you begin.
Times passes…
You are having trouble solving the puzzle. Undeterred, you press on.
More time passes…
You
still can’t solve the puzzle! You sometimes get close, but then you
either lift your pen or double-back. You are frustrated. You try twice
more and give up. The experimenter clicks his stopwatch and writes down
the time. The two of you chat about the experiment. You say that the
puzzle was hard and very frustrating. He nods his head, “Yes, the puzzle is unsolvable.”
Huh?
He
says, “All will become clear in a moment. First, though…” To your
surprise, the experimenter from the taste-test study enters the lab. You
learn that the two studies were, in fact, one study. Those sneaky
psychologists!
The
experimenters think that exercising self-control—by resisting the urge
to eat chocolate chip cookies—depletes will-power. The experimenters
expect that subjects who resist eating chocolate chip cookies won’t have
much will-power left. You learn that other subjects were told to eat
the chocolate chip cookies, but no radishes. Poor them! Those subjects
probably didn’t need to restrain themselves from eating the radishes.
They should have more will-power left after the taste-test. They had
cookies.
So, what
was with the puzzle? Trying to solve a difficult puzzle—especially an
unsolvable one—is extremely frustrating. It takes will-power to control
that frustration and continue on in the face of adversity. So, subjects
who ate the cookies should have persisted longer at the unsolvable
puzzle than did subjects who ate the radishes. And that’s what the
experimenters found.
That
study, and dozens of others like it, show that people only have so much
will-power. When you have to control yourself, there is less will-power
available to you. This fact is a good one to know because people who
lose their will-power often do things that they would rather not. They
become aggressive, sexually impulsive, or start thinking that the later
seasons of Star Trek: Voyager weren’t as bad as everybody says.
Will-Power is Like a Muscle
But
here’s the good news: You can increase your will-power. How? Simple:
Exert some will-power. It’s just like building a muscle. The more you
use your will-power muscle, the stronger it becomes. Of course, after a
will-power ‘workout’ you will be vulnerable. In the long run, though,
you are best served by exercising your will-power as much as you can.
But how can you exercise your will-power? Eating radishes in a bakery
doesn’t seem all that practical. What to do? It’s time to wait for my
next post. I hope that you can control yourself …
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Good Conferencing Habits: Or, How I Learned to Have Fun and Still Get Some Sleep
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What Went Right? You Focused On One Habit!
Motivation
Occasionally I meet someone who did a 'total personal makeover.' In the space of a few weeks or months, they: 1) started exercising; 2) ate better; 3) read more books; 4) learned a new hobby . . .
Good for that person, I say. Here's the problem, though. That's not how it works for most of us most of the time. That's because effective self-change relies on habit change. Habits are highly ingrained behaviors. They are almost automatic. Changing one habit is hard enough. Trying to change more than one at a time is often a recipe for disaster. So, despite the occasional example to the contrary, my advice is to focus on one habit at a time.
What Went Right?
Almost certainly, that's how you managed to change yourself last time. You decided to get a new habit, and you worked on it. Hard. There were 'back slides' and there were times that you didn't think you could do it. But you did. Getting that new habit was the key to your success. If you wanted to do better at work, perhaps your new habit was an early arrival. If you wanted to be healthier, maybe you worked on cooking from scratch more.
Regardless of what the habit was, focusing exclusively on it was a good idea.
That's because habits are highly ingrained behaviors. They're almost automatic. That means that they are extremely hard to change. They're hard to change because they are supposed to be hard to change. Normally, we depend on them not to change. That means it's going to take a lot of effort to replace an old habit with a good one. That's also why it is hard to get a new one. If new habits 'took' the first couple of times, we could have a lot of less than useful habits cluttering up our repertoires!
Also, because habits are virtually automatic, they do something else for you. They free up your will-power so that you can focus on other matters. If you want to change a habit, or introduce a new one, that's going to take a big bunch of will-power. The problem, as I've written about before, is that will-power is a limited resource and that's where the challenge lies. You're going to need to decide to focus your energies on the habit-change. I'll have more to say on how to use your will-power, and how to get more of it, in coming posts but it does behoove us at this point to remain mindful of the fact that changing a habit, or getting a new one, is a tough business. Why on Earth, then, would you try to change more than one at a time?
What Went Right Last Time? You didn't spread yourself too thin. You worked hard, consciously and deliberately. You got your new habit and self-change was your reward.
Occasionally I meet someone who did a 'total personal makeover.' In the space of a few weeks or months, they: 1) started exercising; 2) ate better; 3) read more books; 4) learned a new hobby . . .
Good for that person, I say. Here's the problem, though. That's not how it works for most of us most of the time. That's because effective self-change relies on habit change. Habits are highly ingrained behaviors. They are almost automatic. Changing one habit is hard enough. Trying to change more than one at a time is often a recipe for disaster. So, despite the occasional example to the contrary, my advice is to focus on one habit at a time.
What Went Right?
Almost certainly, that's how you managed to change yourself last time. You decided to get a new habit, and you worked on it. Hard. There were 'back slides' and there were times that you didn't think you could do it. But you did. Getting that new habit was the key to your success. If you wanted to do better at work, perhaps your new habit was an early arrival. If you wanted to be healthier, maybe you worked on cooking from scratch more.
Regardless of what the habit was, focusing exclusively on it was a good idea.
That's because habits are highly ingrained behaviors. They're almost automatic. That means that they are extremely hard to change. They're hard to change because they are supposed to be hard to change. Normally, we depend on them not to change. That means it's going to take a lot of effort to replace an old habit with a good one. That's also why it is hard to get a new one. If new habits 'took' the first couple of times, we could have a lot of less than useful habits cluttering up our repertoires!
Also, because habits are virtually automatic, they do something else for you. They free up your will-power so that you can focus on other matters. If you want to change a habit, or introduce a new one, that's going to take a big bunch of will-power. The problem, as I've written about before, is that will-power is a limited resource and that's where the challenge lies. You're going to need to decide to focus your energies on the habit-change. I'll have more to say on how to use your will-power, and how to get more of it, in coming posts but it does behoove us at this point to remain mindful of the fact that changing a habit, or getting a new one, is a tough business. Why on Earth, then, would you try to change more than one at a time?
What Went Right Last Time? You didn't spread yourself too thin. You worked hard, consciously and deliberately. You got your new habit and self-change was your reward.
What Roy Halladay Can Teach Us About the Importance of Habits
Motivation
Roy Halladay is a great pitcher. Of this there can be no doubt. While he played for my beloved Toronto Blue Jays, he was phenomenal. He won the Cy Young award (best pitcher of the year in the American League). He was our ace. Halladay is as close you can come to a 'sure thing' in baseball. This year, Halladay's first in the major leagues with another team, he was even better. I'm not bitter. Really, I'm not.
I'm in awe.
He pitched a perfect game. That means that Halladay faced the minimum number of hitters (27) with none of the opposing team getting on base. That's only happened 19 times before in major league history.
Fast forward to the playoffs, and Halladay pitched a no-hitter (he walked a guy, so it wasn't a perfect game).
Wow.
How
does Halladay do it? How does he distinguish himself like this?
Remember, he's not playing against slouches. He is playing the best of
the best.
Halladay is Halladay for all sorts of reasons. His intelligence, his ability to focus on the next pitch regardless of what is going on around him, and his physical stature and prowess.
But there's something else.
Roy Halladay has rock solid habits. The day after a (rare) loss, Halladay goes through his routine. The day after an okay start, he goes through his routine. The day after an amazing performance, he goes through his routine. Halladay is Halladay partly because he grinds it out. Day after day. Week after week. Year after year. And there are distractions aplenty. After his no-hitter during the playoffs, for example, the invitations for media appearances were in abundance. He declined, politely I'm sure, and got back to work.
It's that kind of dedication that brought him back to the major leagues early in his career when he was having trouble with his game. It's that kind of hard work, I would argue, that made him able to come back from an appendectomy faster than anyone had thought possible.
There is only one Roy Halladay and his level of achievement is extreme. But we can all take away a fundamental lesson from this phenomenal athlete: People who are habitual about their habits, who keep on truckin regardless of what happened, is happening, or is going to happen, are the people who are more likely to succeed. I wish Halladay a restful off-season. I can't wait to see what he accomplishes in 2011!
Roy Halladay is a great pitcher. Of this there can be no doubt. While he played for my beloved Toronto Blue Jays, he was phenomenal. He won the Cy Young award (best pitcher of the year in the American League). He was our ace. Halladay is as close you can come to a 'sure thing' in baseball. This year, Halladay's first in the major leagues with another team, he was even better. I'm not bitter. Really, I'm not.
I'm in awe.
He pitched a perfect game. That means that Halladay faced the minimum number of hitters (27) with none of the opposing team getting on base. That's only happened 19 times before in major league history.
Fast forward to the playoffs, and Halladay pitched a no-hitter (he walked a guy, so it wasn't a perfect game).
Wow.
How
does Halladay do it? How does he distinguish himself like this?
Remember, he's not playing against slouches. He is playing the best of
the best.Halladay is Halladay for all sorts of reasons. His intelligence, his ability to focus on the next pitch regardless of what is going on around him, and his physical stature and prowess.
But there's something else.
Roy Halladay has rock solid habits. The day after a (rare) loss, Halladay goes through his routine. The day after an okay start, he goes through his routine. The day after an amazing performance, he goes through his routine. Halladay is Halladay partly because he grinds it out. Day after day. Week after week. Year after year. And there are distractions aplenty. After his no-hitter during the playoffs, for example, the invitations for media appearances were in abundance. He declined, politely I'm sure, and got back to work.
It's that kind of dedication that brought him back to the major leagues early in his career when he was having trouble with his game. It's that kind of hard work, I would argue, that made him able to come back from an appendectomy faster than anyone had thought possible.
There is only one Roy Halladay and his level of achievement is extreme. But we can all take away a fundamental lesson from this phenomenal athlete: People who are habitual about their habits, who keep on truckin regardless of what happened, is happening, or is going to happen, are the people who are more likely to succeed. I wish Halladay a restful off-season. I can't wait to see what he accomplishes in 2011!
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