Trouble Conquering Consistency? Here’s The Secret No One Shares About Creating Habits

 

Habits are powerful. Good habits are integral to our success in life. So how do we develop and keep good habits? We’ve heard over and over that the best way to develop the right habits is through repetition. Take the thing you want to become habitual and do it over and over and over. Some schools of thought say to do it for 17 days and it will become a habit. Some say to do it for 21 days. Some say 60. But regardless of the number of days we embrace, we’ve been convinced that the way to develop and KEEP a habit is to do it over and over again. But is it really? According to social scientist BJ Fogg, Director of the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford University, the answer is no. He maintains that there’s something else that causes actions to become habits that STICK. This “something else” can skyrocket your success at developing and keeping solid habits. What is it? April tells you in episode 34 of the Winning Mindset Mastery Podcast.

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Trouble Conquering Consistency? Here’s The Secret No One Shares About Creating Habits

In this episode, I want to reframe the way that you look at creating a habit. This information is hot off the press, at least to me. As someone who has always been trying to hack and use neuroscience, NLP, and any way possible to develop good, powerful habits, I am thrilled to have this piece of information. For most of us, we’ve been told that the best way to develop a habit is repetition. Some schools of thought say 17 days, some say 21, and some say 60-something. Whatever it is you believe, we usually correlate the behavior being done over and over again with developing that habit that’s long-lasting and allows us to have a great deal of success.

There is a correlation 100% between the activity being repeated over and over again and building a habit, but there’s no causation. It is not that repetitive activity that causes that habit to form, which was interesting to me to learn. It was BJ Fogg, a social scientist and the Director of the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford, who shared this. It makes much sense when you start to dive in and think about it because he said it’s not the repetitive action. It is the positive emotion that you associate with that repetitive action, emotion, and feeling that develops a habit that you’ll stick to.

 

That’s incredibly powerful because some of the easiest habits to develop are the ones that bring with them automatic good feelings. I think about exercise and maybe folks who love to run, you get a runner’s high. That only happened to me once or twice, but exercise overall gives you endorphins and you get this great sense of accomplishment. That’s a habit that can be pretty easy to develop if you do it for a short period of time because that good feeling is there almost automatically, and it’s that good feeling that ties that powerful emotion to the habit and makes us want to do it more and makes it easier for us to keep up with it.

It's that good feeling that ties that powerful emotion to the habit, makes us want to do it more, and makes it easier for us to keep up with it. Share on X

My dog, Cowboy, is a creature of habit. As I think about this, it works for animals too, because where he’s very routine-based and there are certain things that he wants to happen at a certain time every day. Nothing is as big for him on a routine scale as when he eats. My dog does not like to do anything as much as he likes to eat. Maybe play, but I still think play is after eating. This makes much sense in how it works with our brains, animals’ brains, and children’s brains.

We can use this to our benefit from a mindset perspective because there are many ways to work on your mindset that also help you feel incredibly good. One of them is the practice I talked about several episodes ago about waking up and spending those first 30 seconds of your day thinking about the things that you appreciate and are grateful for in your life.

That’s a practice that it’s easier to make a habit of because when you’re done doing it, you feel much better about starting your day, even if you woke up in a good mood. Another one that I’ve talked about is the act of sharing your three wins from the previous day. Whether you’re sharing them out loud with yourself, putting them in a journal, or sharing them with other people. When you’re focused on your wins, you not only put yourself in a better mindset, but it’s easier to form that habit because you have that positive emotion tied to it.

 

Some of the things that we want to do don’t easily have positive emotions tied to them like eating broccoli or for a kid brushing your teeth. Think about how understanding the psychology around this, we can make it that much easier. We can make brushing our teeth as a child more of a game and celebrate at the end that we did it. When you are trying to do something that you know is important for you but doesn’t have that integrated feel-good feeling to it, let yourself celebrate a little bit at the end that you did it. If it’s trying to keep your car cleaned out and you did it for a day or a week, giving yourself congratulations or a reward or anything that emotionally makes you feel great about it will make it much easier for you to keep doing it.

I love this as a practice, and I love that there is yet another way that we can make practicing consistent habits that work for us easier and continue on that winning mindset journey with yet another tool that we have. Try this out. Try to find good-feeling things that you can associate with the habits that you’re trying to build. Let me know how it works for you. Come on over to the website WinningMindsetMasteryPodcast.com.

 

At the very bottom, there is an Ask April section where you can record a quick message in your own voice, tell me how it’s going, ask me a question, and I can answer you that same way privately and personally. We can have a two-way conversation about how these tools are working for you. I can’t wait to find out. Here’s to your success.