Atomic Habits: The Path to Lasting Transformational Change
As January comes to an end and New Year resolutions start to fade away, it’s a great time to reflect on what actually allows impactful change to stick. In our modern world, we often chase big results—fast! My invitation for you today is to focus instead on directionally correct little steps which if sustained over the long run can totally change the trajectory of your life. Habits expert James Clear cleverly coined the term Atomic Habits for these tiny yet powerful changes and highlights that a 1% improvement every day for a year results in a 37x return (that is, 3,700%)! And this is just one year. Imagine what you can achieve in 5, 10 or a lifetime.
The Myth of the Overnight Success
We’ve all heard of companies that “all of a sudden” became an “overnight success”. Well guess what? They didn’t. They’ve actually been working really hard, making mistakes and recovering for many years prior— improving their product, their marketing, their operations, little by little, until finally they reached this point when you know about them. Same occurs with any legendary athlete, writer, musician, investor or chess player: they are not just talented and lucky. They almost certainly also practiced consistently and incrementally for a really long time. As journalist Malcolm Gladwell argues in his book Outliers, “the key to achieving world-class expertise in any skill, is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing the correct way, for a total of around 10,000 hours”. This can be achieved, for example, by working 20 hours a week for 10 years and note that this is if you are going for world-class expertise!
The same logic of course applies to negative practices. Think of some negative “little” habits you may have such as living in a constant grind with no time for reset, or snapping at your partner every time something bothers you, or consistently giving in when your kids whine. How do you think sustaining these habits will payoff for you over the long run?
An Invitation
As February rolls in, I’d like to invite you to stop dreaming of overnight successes and try out building a life of practices, one small habit at a time. Whether it’s getting in shape, changing the culture of your organization, achieving financial freedom, or raising successful kids, you can do it — by breaking the elephant into little pieces and eating one little piece at a time. If you are smart, moreover, in making those little bites habitual —aka automatic!— over the long run, I assure you, you’ll be living the life of your dreams and freeing up brainpower to dream even bigger.
Willpower vs. Habits
When setting internal commitments we tend to put a lot of faith on our willpower (i.e. “on Monday I will start that diet”) and then blame our lack of it for breaking them (i.e. “I was so bad tonight”). The thing is we plan these radical changes with our “rational brain” (i.e. prefrontal cortex) which seems to be totally on board at the time. Yet it’s our “emotional brain” (i.e. limbic + endocrine system) that have taken over when temptations lead us astray. The only way to circumvent this power struggle within our brain, is to focus on building habits.
You’d be surprised to know that the people you think of as being most disciplined are actually setting up their environment and time commitments in a way in which they need very little willpower to follow through. Habits take some time to set up (on average, about 66 days), but once established, they are pretty much automatic and hence require very little effort.
It is actually much smarter and effective to work on building habits because relying on willpower is like trying to swim upstream. You can do it for a while but eventually, you’ll inevitably get tired and give in. Our brains, on the other hand, are naturally wired to form habits. If you think about it, it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective as these mental shortcuts minimize our decision-making on repetitive behaviors and free up mental capacity for other (purportedly more important) tasks. Take a moment and reflect on how much of your life is habitual: from brushing your teeth and your morning coffee to checking your email or social media every time you see your phone, to how you react to anger and stress. Habits are in fact so pervasive, that many of us have become quite robotic, living in a perpetual grind like zombies, without being present, reacting instead of responding to life. This is a big problem central to my work and that of the mindfulness revolution, yet out of the scope of this article. What I am focusing on here today is our capacity to create intentional, meaningful habits— habits that over time can change our life drastically for the better.
My Personal Experience
A lot of people ask me how do you stay so skinny and fit, it must be genetics! And actually no. I had a time in my late teenage years when I gained a significant amount of weight and got on the dieting wagon only to find myself breaking the diet, gaining more weight, feeling terrible about myself and starting yet another diet. It was only until I slowly established sustainable healthy eating habits and a consistent yoga practice that I was able to get back into a shape I liked. My eating habits and yoga practice have now become so natural to me that I’ve pretty much maintained the same weight, with minimal effort, for the past 15 years, even after two pregnancies.
More recently, I’ve picked up Aikido — a martial art of peaceful conflict resolution— which I’ve come to love. It is a far commute and I have a busy schedule so I only committed to go once a week. But I’ve gone pretty much every week for the past year and I know that one day, maybe in 10 years, maybe in 20, I will earn a black belt because as long as I keep showing up for one hour every week, my skill will build up. It wont be an overnight black belt; I will have worked toward it little by little in a kind of effortless effort which is what life practices are!
Let’s Talk About You
What atomic habits could change the trajectory of your life? I invite you to take at least a few moments to reflect on this now. Think about the key areas of your life (i.e. family, health, emotional wellbeing, money, career, relationships, spirituality…). Reflect briefly on the areas that are most important to you and then pick one which you intuitively feel needs most attention/ could unlock most in your life right now. What specifically is bothering or concerning you about it? What outcome would you like to achieve? Then think, what is the smallest step you can take to move in that direction? And finally, formulate ONE new atomic habit you want to commit to.
Tips for Building Atomic Habits
You can learn more about how habits work on a prior article, but some useful tips here:
Start with a small BEHAVIOR and then gradually build up (i.e. 2 minute meditation, and increase by 1 minute as this becomes easy)
Be clear about WHEN and WHERE you are going to do WHAT. You can either choose a specific time or define you will do it after another well-established habit (i.e. I’m going to go for a 10 minute run in the neighborhood every Wednesday at 7am (or after having my coffee)).
Specify the CUE that will prompt your habit (habits always need a cue in order to be established!) So for example, if you are trying to establish the habit of going on a date night every Thursday with your partner, mark it on your calendars repeating every week.
Habits also require a REWARD right after the behavior to close the loop. It may be that just going for that run will give you a sense of accomplishment plus feel-good endorphins, but you can also add an extra motivation if you need it such as picking up a delicious healthy juice on your way back.
Know that your environment has a HUGE impact on your behavior so be an architect instead of a victim of it. So for example, If you must work from home and want to be more productive, set up a separate space from the temptations of the kitchen and couch that will help you respect that space better. If you want to eat less cookies, don’t keep them at home. And if you want to eat more fruit, put them out in a nice bowl in the counter versus on the bottom drawer of your fridge!
Keep a log of your new habit for at least one and ideally three months. It can be as simple as a calendar or handwritten piece of paper you put on your fridge/wall/nightstand/desk, where you can mark a check or put a sticker or smiley face every time you keep up with your goal. In addition to helping you visually track your progress, it will work as a cue, a reward and a motivator.
Tell someone about your new habit to help you keep you accountable. It can be someone who wants to build the same habit as you or just anyone who can best support you.
If you have any questions, comments or would like some help defining or building transformational life practices, I’m always happy to connect.