Finally, I tell them, “You will know you’ve truly reached the level of a micro habit, when you say, ‘That’s so ridiculously small, it’s not worth doing’” - in this case reading only one paragraph each night. When I tell them reading for an hour each night is too large, they then change to reading for 45 minutes, then 30 minutes, and so on. It usually takes my workshop participants between three and eight tries before they come up with something sufficiently small enough to be considered a micro habit. With that in mind, consider these five steps for getting started: Identify a “ridiculously small” micro habit. To succeed with micro habits, you must be deliberate and choreograph steps to sustain them. Any changes to our routine and ingrained behavior is difficult. But we often underestimate our resistance to smaller adjustments as well. The reality about big behavioral changes is that it’s unlikely you’ll make a dramatic shift overnight - otherwise you would have done it long ago. We might feel silly doing something minuscule and spending any time on it might not seem worthwhile, so we talk ourselves out of doing them at the start.Įven incorporating a tiny shift into our routines is harder than we might imagine. We’re indoctrinated to - and rewarded for - thinking big, not executing small. But people still struggle to implement them. The idea of making change through small habits isn’t new others have discussed and written about it in the past. Formidable objectives suddenly become achievable. Two years later, I ran my first 10K race - something I’d been trying to do unsuccessfully for a couple of decades. When I eventually made it to the gym, my next micro habit was to simply walk on the treadmill for 10 minutes each day. For example, when I first started running, my micro habit was to lay out my gym clothes the night before and get into them first thing in the morning. By breaking down an ambitious job into smaller, more achievable ones that you build over long periods of time, micro habits help you complete big goals. Micro habits are small components of a larger habit. It’s great to dream big, but the way to achieve big is to start small - through micro habits. Instead of striding forward, we slide backward. Falling short of a lofty goal creates a negative spiral of discouragement deterring future action. As high achievers, we’re programmed to “go big or go home” and to “set big hairy audacious goals.” Big goals are more burdensome than they are motivational they require daunting effort to accomplish and sustain in our busy lives.
When presented with a problem that requires behavior change, we pounce on it with big goals - only to find ourselves locked into a self-defeating cycle. Like participants in dozens of prior coaching groups I’ve facilitated, these high-potential, high-achieving, and highly stressed professionals first sketched out ambitious plans: the man who never exercised vowed to visit the gym for a minimum of 30 minutes daily the woman who was plugged into email until midnight now planned an hour of pleasure reading before bedtime the man just finishing his second dessert was swearing off sugar entirely. Humbled by the results, their immediate task was to identify a small change of habit to improve their situation. Their uncharacteristic appearance was because of a just-completed assessment that said most of them were in a full-blown crisis trying to manage their time and energy. These were the successful, ambitious participants in a peer coaching group, and they’d been nominated to attend a leadership program by their bosses.
They ranged from sheepish to flustered to outright embarrassed. The six faces around the table displayed expressions not usually seen in a corporate room.
0 kommentar(er)
