Read this if You are Ready to Stop Giving Up on Building Good Habits

So you’ve just read an article about the incredible, life-changing benefits of meditation and you feel this wave of motivation hit you. You want to start building this habit that so many of the world’s most successful people have already incorporated into their daily lives. And you’re going to start today.

You can already see yourself sitting cross-legged on a yoga mat feeling happy and invigorated, reaping all the benefits: clarity, better focus, emotional stability.

But, despite your excitement, a shadow of doubt starts creeping up.

You remember January of this year, when for the fourth time you got swept into the storm of motivation to eat better or exercise more or wake up early.

And it was fantastic for the first week or two.

Then it started to get a bit tedious but you didn’t let that stop you. You are DETERMINED to see this through.

And… inevitably that one day comes. On the 29th of January you woke up with a headache and sore throat and even the thought of driving to the gym was overwhelming, let alone running for 30 minutes on a treadmill. You have a brief inner struggle before collapsing back into bed and, just like that, you’ve missed your first day of the habit.

February rolls around and you’re still working out but you find that your willpower is getting shaky. It becomes easy to just miss a day or two…or five…and by the change of the season you are just paying for a gym membership you never use.

Your version of the story might be longer or shorter but I’m sure we’ve all been there. It’s hard not to be a cynic when the odds are stacked so heavily against you.

Statistics show that only about 8% of people stick to their New Year’s resolutions. To put that into perspective- list 10 people you know. Mum, dad, best friend, significant other, brother, sister, your children. Go ahead, use your fingers, it makes it much easier to count.

Now let’s say the person who is represented by the pinkie of your left hand sticks to their resolution. Go them! But that means everyone else fails- which can be a lot more jarring when they all have names and faces. And that’s while overestimating the percentage of success.

With all this in mind, it is understandable that so many people are hesitant to take the steps necessary for change. We all get lulled into the false sense of security of our comfort zones but doing nothing often means that you are slowly moving downwards on the success curve. It may be so slow as to be negligible right now but once you do notice a change, things tend to go downhill fast. If you keep the slight edge mentality (credited to Jeff Olsen) in mind, then even baby steps in a positive direction are worth it.

There is a silver lining to all this. When you look at the few people who succeed, they tend to do so because they have a strategy in place.

Despite being so integral to growth, we are never really taught the how’s of habit building and this plays a big role in the huge rate of failure. Like anything else, building habits is much easier when you have a structure in place and some fundamentals to help you along.

I’m not great at maths. But if you give me a right-angled triangle with an angle and a length I could easily work out the perimeter. Simple trigonometry and a bit of addition- all of which was drilled into me in high school.

On the other hand, if I had never attended my high school maths classes and you presented the same question with the promise that ‘solving this will lead you to success’ I would be in a lot of trouble. Even if I put as much time and energy as humanly possible into the problem, the only thing I would get out of it is frustration and a lot of self-doubt. Sure, someone went through that situation and came out as the founder of trigonometry but we can’t all be Hipparchus.

The point I was trying to make with the ramble-y analogy is that the reason so many of us fail to stick to our habits is because we weren’t properly prepared for it. We get discouraged when we fail time and time again to follow through with our commitments and this ends up making us hesitant to get back up and try again. Let’s change that.

In my next blog post, I will share my favourite strategy to build lasting habits. This one is already long enough as it is but I believe it is necessary to help approach change with the right mentality. After all, the strategy isn’t a magic fix. It is still going to take a lot of perseverance and mental grit in order to transform something from being foreign to automatic. That being said, knowing how to manipulate the habit loop and setting low-high bars will make the journey a whole lot smoother.

In preparation to take on the strategy, you should first go back to your goals and identify the possible habits which will drive you closer to your version of success. From these, pick one. Only one. Multitasking is just doing a lot of things poorly at the same time. If you don’t know what to choose, we will also look at that as part of the strategy.

On top of this, you need to make a list of all the bad habits you have. Smoking, binge eating, consistently not getting enough sleep…all the things that you feel are negatively impacting your life. We’re going to try tackle those as well.

Hopefully by now you are starting to feel that wave of excitement build. It’s not going to be easy but there’s no reason to let your doubts hold you back from taking the plunge. I promise it’s worth it.

As always, thanks for taking the time to be here. I really appreciate it :)