Transcript:
Habits are very very powerful. They may seem small but when you really think about it, because you’re doing a series of actions repetitively, the results eventually compound.
They pretty much grow exponentially over time. And your habits can either work for you or against you.
If you do have good habits, you are compounding those positive results over time and they work in your favor. But on the other hand, if you do have bad habits or not so good habits, those negative results also compound over time and eventually work against you.
Habits can pretty much determine whether or not you would be successful or whether you’ll fail at anything. So you want to be mindful of the sort of habits you’re building and make sure they are habits that will work in your favor.
While you’re building new habits that will work in your favor, especially when you’re just starting out, you have to remember that there would be a time when you would be disappointed. Because you’ll not be seeing the results immediately.
That is what James refers to as the valley of disappointment.
It’s important to remember that because you have to set the right expectations for yourself. especially when you’re just starting out a new habit.
If you don’t see the results as soon as you like, you will get disappointed and it’ll be really hard for you to stay consistent with that.
When you set the right expectations with yourself, you’re able to be more patient and more realistic about when you would expect to see an outcome.
To give you an example of the sort of factors you’d want to consider, let’s say you’re not happy with the spots on your face. You want to work on getting clear skin — you want to try out a new routine.
You’d have to wait four to six weeks before you would expect to see results. Because that is how long the skin cycle is — it takes about four to six weeks for your skin to renew.
You would definitely not be seeing results in a few days, not even one week.
This can apply to any sort of habits you’re building; whether it’s workouts. Maybe you’re trying to tone your muscles — you have to do that research so that you’re setting the right expectations for yourself.
That way you find it a lot easier to stay consistent and be patient with the process.
Who you are today is pretty much a combination of a number of habits.
You would want to take inventory of the sort of habits you have and figure out what sort of habits are working for you and what sort of habits are working against you.
You’d really want to change those habits and just not waste any more time to the point it gets harder for you to reverse them.
As you are thinking about your habits, you have to remember that it starts with your identity.
Let’s say you have a habit of procrastinating, and you consider yourself to be a procrastinator. It’ll be a lot harder for you to break that habit because it is tied to your identity. It is tied to how you define yourself.
If you really want to overcome that habit of procrastination, you would have to distance yourself from it. Rather than you being a procrastinator, you would want to consider yourself as a person who procrastinates.
Or even better, you would want to think about the sort of person you want to become — someone who always gets things done on time. Then use that as the sort of identity that will help you overcome that bad habit of procrastinating.
That is pretty much how you build habits. It really starts from your identity. You could either use that as a way to break away from bad habits, or as a way to build good habits.
While you think about the sort of identity — the sort of person you want to become — you can figure out the sort of habits that you want to build. Or the sort of habits you want to break away from.
You can then figure out the sort of outcomes that you want to get and based on that, work backward.
Work forward as well, starting from your identity.
Simply put, the sort of habits you cultivate eventually define who you become.
When you think about habits in general, there are four stages — cue, craving, response and reward.
You could use this as a way to figure out how to build the habits you want and break away from bad habits.
I will explore that in the coming slides but this is just a way for you to understand how habits come into play. There is a cue — something that triggers you to act. Then there is that craving, you wanting to experience that or you wanting to get the reward or the outcome. And then you’re responding to that craving and finally, you get the reward.
If you want to break a bad habit, you can use that habit loop to guide you.
For example, if you’re spending too much time on your phone and you want to break that habit, you could figure out a way to make it invisible.
You can keep your phone in a place that is not so obvious — because maybe whenever you see your phone, it triggers you to take it and scroll through different apps. If that is the cue that you get — just seeing that phone, you could try figuring out ways to maybe hide it or make it less visible.
Then you could think about ways to make it unattractive. For example, think about the sort of impact that it would have on you in the long term. Think about what else you could do with the time that you would otherwise be wasting on your phone.
That is just one example. You could also think about ways to make it difficult. You could maybe lock it in a drawer and keep the key in a place that is maybe upstairs or harder to reach. So you’d have to go through many hoops just to get your phone.
That way, you’re making it more difficult to reach.
You could also think about ways to make it more unsatisfying. I met someone sometime back who told me that his phone is in black and white. That’s his own way of making it unsatisfying.
I have installed an app that notifies me every time I’m spending more time that I would have liked to. It pretty much blocks me from using specific apps any longer. If I want to keep using it, I have to go back to that app and change the settings — quite frustrating.
Because of that, I don’t find using my phone as satisfying as I would have otherwise.
You could use a similar approach when you’re trying to build good habits.
For example, if you’re not happy with the way you’re eating. Say you eat a lot of unhealthy snacks and you want to change that. You want to eat more fruits and vegetables. You could figure out ways to use the habit loop to incorporate that habit.
You could make it more obvious. You could think about places where you spend a lot of time at home. Maybe you could have some fruits in your bedroom or in the sitting room where you watch movies.
You could try to make it more attractive by thinking about the sort of benefits it would have on your health in the long term. By thinking about how you would look — how proud you feel of yourself.
Then think about ways to make it easy. For example, you could cut and clean some vegetables and have them in your fridge so you’ll find it a lot easier to whip up something quickly.
You could make it more fun. You could make it more satisfying by trying out new new recipes. By trying to make it as delicious as possible, so when you eat healthy, it actually is delicious. It’s not something that you would want to run away from.
While building these new habits, you have to do them repetitively. After all, that is what habits is all about. But there’s no particular number that you have to repeat until it becomes a habit.
It depends on the person. It depends on the sort of habits you’re trying to build. But you have to remember that it is okay to maybe miss one or two — as long as you don’t make it a habit of breaking that habit, you’re all good.
So don’t feel guilty — don’t feel bad about yourself for having some slips. It’s totally okay. You’re human. Just try to make sure that you repeat that habit as much as possible.
While building new habits, depending on the sort of habit — if say you’re trying to do some workouts, you’re trying to build that into your routine — you could also figure out ways to be more effective at your workouts. This is where mastery comes in.
When you’re deliberate about trying to make improvements and do better, you eventually become a master at your craft.
I hope you found this video helpful. Thank you very much for watching. You could subscribe — I will be posting videos like this every two or three weeks.
Thanks again for your time — I really appreciate it. Bye! Take care!