The Kung Fu of Adopting Good Habits and Switching Out Bad Ones
Four (not-so) secret techniques to help you successfully modify your behavior.
We will always want to ditch poor habits for better, more productive ones. Yet this is not an easy task. You have to make an effort and practice desired behaviors every day as if they were kung fu drills. Using these 4 techniques (which I’ve learned from a Kevin Kruse podcast episode) to assist your drills will greatly increase your chances of success in such an endeavor:
1. Add friction to your bad habits
Adding friction to bad habits means making it that much more difficult to engage in those behaviors. For example, do you want to lose weight? The principal way to do that is to change your eating habits and eat healthily.
One way to add friction to poor dietary habits is to remove temptation from your home. Willpower doesn’t stand a chance when a bag of chips is in sight. So make sure your home does not have that bag of Ruffles. This way if you do want to indulge, you’re going to have to go the extra mile and get a bag from the market.
Add friction to your bad habits by making them difficult to indulge in.
2. Reduce friction for good habits
Reducing friction in this context means making it easier for you to practice the behaviors that you want to adopt. For example, do you want to read more? If yes, then make your kindle app more accessible on your electronic devices. Just by doing that, it becomes more likely that you will read.
Reduce friction for good habits by removing barriers to access.
3. Tie your new habit to an anchor habit
An effective way to cement a new habit is to hook it to an anchor habit. Anchor habits are core behaviors that we have adopted and are engrained in us.
For example, an anchor habit for many people is morning coffee on the couch. If you want to cement your reading habit — tie it to an anchor habit. Have a book handy near the coffee table in the morning.
4. Have an accountability partner
Finally, having an accountability partner can be crucial to success if you want to develop a new habit or get rid of old behaviors. This can be a family member or someone else who is also cultivating that habit. Give them the license to call you out when you drop the ball.
I kicked my smoking habit in no small part because I had an accountability partner (my best friend) who would take me to task whenever I reached for a cigarette.
Employing these four techniques will greatly increase your chances of cultivating productive behaviors or getting rid of undesirable habits.
Try them and let me know how it works out for you!
