Every year 41% of hopeful Americans make New Year’s Resolutions. However, though 52% of them were confident they would keep their resolution (does that seem low to you?), only 9-12% do.
Frankly I’m surprised that the success rate is so high when most New Year’s Resolutions have no planning behind them and are probably created in between your 7th and 8th glasses of bubbly.
To paraphrase, the road to failure is paved with good intentions – because strangely enough, we spend a lot of time talking ourselves out of achieving the thing we really want – probably more than we spend talking ourselves into them!
Human beings sure are weird.
So if our subconscious is working against us, let’s get smart and use our conscious brain to create behaviours we really want.
There’s a couple of ways to stop yourself talking yourself out of a really good behaviour.
The 5-Second Rule, as proposed by Mel Robbins
Unlike the 3-second rule which allows you to recover your Vegemite toast that has fallen wrong-side-down onto the floor and eat it with no risk to your health (sadly, a myth apparently), the 5-second rule comes with no risk at all.
According to Ms Robbins, 5 seconds is the time it takes for the subconscious to catch up with the conscious brain. So, say you want to get up early, you have 5 seconds after your 5am alarm goes off to get up before your subconscious tells you this would be the act of a crazy person, what you really need is more sleep. The longer you deliberate, the less likely you are to resist the urge to catch a few more zzzzs.
Change a Desired Behaviour into a Habit
The second is to identify a behaviour (part of your process, see earlier in the table), that if repeated will help you move towards your goal. Then turn that behaviour into a habit.
Depending on what we are doing, between 45 and 90% of what we do is habit. From a human efficiency perspective, the more our behaviour is habitual the better, as it requires little brain power.
The great thing about creating a useful habit is that your disruptive subconscious will not get a look-in because it’s not a decision, it’s just a behaviour. You don’t think about getting up to your 5am alarm. When you find yourself thinking at all you’re already up and dressed.
Consider brushing your teeth every day. You can come up with many reasons why you do that but in the end, you do it because it feels weird not to. It’s not a decision, it’s just a behaviour. Habits are the most reliable behaviour you can have.
If you’re interested in finding out more about this and learning how to craft them so they can create reliable behaviours that lead to your goal, I recommend working with me and/or reading:
- BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits
- James Clear’s Atomic Habits
- Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit
If you can’t be bothered to do any of that, and just want to know the rules of creating life-changing habits that take the effort out of behaviour change:
- Start with a trigger. Something that you do, or something that when it happens you ALWAYS want to do the desired behaviour. Eg when I do this, when I feel this, when I am here, I always do this.
- Identify a behaviour you want to do
- Reward the behaviour immediately
- Repeat until it sticks and you can’t help but do it.
- Identify a behaviour you want to do
- Reward the behaviour immediately
- Repeat until it sticks and you can’t help but do it.
And if you could do with some additional guidance, hacks, inspiration or support, you can book a call with me here
5 TOP TIPS TO MAKE HABITS EASIER AND MORE POWERFUL
- The trick to achieving a goal based on repeating a behaviour is to develop a HABIT (which is NOT ABOUT WILLPOWER)
- The trick to getting the behaviour engrained is REPETITION (not how well you do eg toothbrushing is a habit because you do it often, not because you do it well).
- The trick to repetition is to make it EASY and, ideally, ENJOYABLE so you want to do it again
- The trick to achievement is to REPEAT, BUILDING UP DIFFICULTY SLOWLY OVER TIME and keeping the joy in it.
- Keep focussed on what is building the HABIT, not the outcome
