Tiny Habits, Big Results
I’ve spent the past year testing out a strategy for habit change that I call “Micro-Resolutions”. It’s based in part on the work of BJ Fogg, a researcher out of Stanford that wrote a book called Tiny Habits, which has become somewhat of a ‘movement’ in the Behavior Change world. He has spent a decade+ looking at the disconnect between what people say they want for their lives, and the ways they actually organize their lives with their habitual behaviour. He’s found - and here’s where we can all breathe a sigh of relief - that our seeming immunity to change is largely a function of our brain’s ‘factory’ settings, but/and that we can take small but meaningful steps to ‘re-shape’ the way our minds see things in order to get more of what we want. The basic premise is the idea that for a habit to exist, 3 things have to be present:
Habit = Motivation + Ability + Prompt
Motivation and Ability are the foundations, and the Prompt is the gasoline on the fire, so-to-speak. I’ll share my personal experience, which was and continues to be transformational: In December of 2019 I read Gretchen Ruben’s book The Happiness Project, in which she organizes a year of her life around themes and behaviors tied to those themes that she wanted to explore. So I sketched out a few things I’d been curious about trying - to start the list was: meditating, “doing something artistic”, eating more fruits and vegetables, a daily walk, and reading more. I looked at the list and brainstormed the smallest thing I could do to honor the spirit of that area, and set about committing to trying the different habits/concepts in 30 day increments. In January, I took the concept of meditation and translated that into a “Tiny Habit” by sitting for 10 minutes with the Calm app every morning right after I woke up and washed my face. I remember so clearly at day 4 - 4! - thinking to myself…”If I was trying to make this a ‘forever habit’ right now, I’d be done”. But, since I had only 26 more days to go, I decided to stick with it. That by far was the single most important change I’ve ever made. It created the foundation for so much personal growth, and turned out to be what habit-gurus call a ‘cornerstone’ or ‘keystone’ habit (one that interacts or intersects with other behaviors in a significant way). I’ll admit, that was totally accidental. I just knew I needed a bit more calm in my life so I figured testing out meditation first made sense.
I refined the process over time so that I was incorporating the M(otivation) component more intentionally, by tying each proposed habit to my values and what’s important to me in life. Here is a partial list of the habits I ‘tried on’ over the course of 12 months, and the table format shows that my process evolved to my tying the habit intentionally to a personal Value, to give it more resonance and likelihood to be at least interesting, if not persistent:
My life is absolutely, unequivocally better today for having done this experiment (which I’m continuing in 2021). One important note is that the only habit that I’ve mostly maintained in daily practice is meditation; the rest are either now incorporated much more into my life than they would have been had I not intentionally introduced them in a focused way (like reading, walking, better eating), or they were really fun experiments that I’m grateful to have in my experience bank (like drawing).
Having now studied BJ Fogg’s work, and worked with my coaching clients on these techniques, I’ve layered in the Prompt or “Anchor Moment” as he calls it, to create an even greater likelihood of success. Essentially, that’s tying any new habit to a habit you already have. Think of things like making coffee or going to the bathroom or waking up or going to sleep, or eating. You may need a post-it note or two to start, until the habit becomes automatically tied to the anchor - in my experience, that takes ~1 week.
I’d love to hear if anyone is trying this and how it’s working for you!