You Don’t Have Habits, Your Habits Have You!
We all love to believe that we have free will, and of course we do. It's just that when it comes to habits, almost by definition, a lot of our behavior is happening “on automatic”. Habitual, often means, driven by something other than our will! That’s why we tell ourselves “I ran out of willpower” to explain the fact that we failed to create a new habit, or stick with it over time. Our old habits “defeated” our will power.
Our habits can be captors or companions. If our habits don’t serve us, these vices can feel like they have us in their grips. If our habits serve us, they are like our “right hand person”, helping us achieve our goals, live the life we want and get things done!
There’s just one problem. The things we believe about how to create new habits, and quit old habits, are mostly based on “common sense”. Unfortunately, the science of habit change is neither well known and while sensible, certainly counterintuitive.
Two decades back, Habits at Work established the Behavioral Research Applied Technology Laboratory, now owned and run by the original lead researchers. And today, the Habits at Work business still runs on the insights from BRATLAB. Specifically, we believe that…
Changing more than one habit at a time is almost (and for practical purposes is) impossible. Yet we persist in trying to change multiple habits at the same time.
Before you can create a new habit, you need to remove an old habit that occupies the same time and “shape” in your day, where you want the new habit to grow. Want to get into an exercise program and you like to work out in the morning? Well then giving up your evening TV time to create the space isn't going to get it done. It’s at the wrong time of the day, compared to the new habit you want to grow.
We don’t actually HAVE habits. Instead, our habits have us. Meaning, most of our behavior is “encoded” in the world around us. Walk into a library and you’ll automatically practice the habit of being quiet. That habit is encoded in the library as a “context” for your life.
Contexts are:
In the background (like the stage on which life plays out).
Highly influential over our behavior in the foreground. Like the library “making us” be quiet.
Are still powerful, even when we notice the influence.
So, if we’re so strongly influenced by the world around us, is all hope lost? No, we can learn the skills of Context Design: designing our habits into our contexts so the behaviors we want to grow become the easy default, and NOT the hard choice that relies on willpower.
The first skill is awareness: being able to see where our habits “live”, and in which context they are mainly encoded. Unfortunately, as humans, our environment is complex and made up of many things. The library is not just a building, it’s also a set of rules, and in that building is a group of people following those rules, and it’s also a set of stories we tell ourselves about what behavior makes sense and will be acceptable or effective in a given place. Labeling these various contexts can be helpful to more easily become aware of where our habits live.
The Context of the SELF is made up of our mindsets, our beliefs and the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves (“I’m a rule follower, and I therefore follow the silence rule when I enter a library”).
The SOCIAL Context is the behavior of people around us and the powerful influence on our own behavior. We tend to do what other people are doing, and that’s actually a very effective mental shortcut because often (but not always of course), other people “know the rules and follow them.” When I walk into a library, even if I didn’t know it was one, but everyone around me is being quiet or wisherping, it’s very unlikely that I’ll simply start yelling. We look for cues, clues and social “news” or norms to see what to do, and then, often without even thinking about it, we do what others around us do. Want to change your habits? Change who you spend time with to those people who already practice the habit you want to develop!
The SPACES Context is the physical space and all that’s in it. Signs, pathways, scents, nudges and more. Libraries have “please be silent” signs everywhere. The better ones have floors designed to absorb the sound of footsteps.
The SYSTEMS Context is the set of rules or laws that govern a certain space or activity. They may be written down, or simply known but not recorded “the way we do things here.” Driving on the right hand side of the road is a great example. It’s a rule, a law, and we follow that law because we know the consequences of not doing so.
The second skill is being able to REDESIGN your contexts so that they encode for the new behavior, making them the easy default. Or, the skill of changing your contexts. If you’re wanting to develop your habit of singing, for example, it would be obvious to you that you should find somewhere other than a library to do that. Most people try to change their habits without changing their contexts. To effectively change our contexts, we can either simply change them (get new friends, move locations, change our mindsets, etc), OR, we can redesign our contexts so they now support our new habits. How? There are four ways of making each one of our contexts more powerful to support our goal habits…
We can make it easier to practice the habit by either improving our skill at the habit (through practice with a coach) or our confidence in practicing a habit (again, developed through practice, coaching, mindset work or simply watching others and “borrowing” their confidence - “if they can do it, I can do it”).
We can boost our motivation by improving the payoff we get when we practice the habit. And I don’t mean financial incentives. We can boost our motivation by including more meaning. Instead of “exercising to get fit,” I can tell myself “I’m exercising to be a better parent” and now every time I think about not exercising, I have the added incentive of doing something as a gift for my kids.
We can reduce our barriers. Often our reasons for not practicing a habit are made up excuses like “I don’t have the time.” In fairness, sometimes there are physical barriers such as “I don’t live near a gym.” With a little thought, we can find ways around these barriers so they no longer stop us.
Finally, we can find ways to resist the temptations (yes, I know you can’t resist!) that distract us from doing the things we’re committed to do, or lead to failure. If your vice is alcohol, stop going to bars and having it easily accessible in your house. If your vice is Netflix, cancel the subscription.
So, what’s all this got to do with trust? Well, if you can’t trust yourself to stick to your own promises to yourself, how can you expect other people to trust you?
Here are a couple of ideas to help you on your path to being a successful Context Designer (A Trusted, Habit Creator):
Remain a student: Rather than assuming what the right habits should be, do a little research on which habits will really serve you. For example, we tend to think that the best habit to develop to increase seller effectiveness is “better pitching” but the research is pretty clear: Customers decide THAT they want to buy from a given SELLER before they decide if and what they want to buy from their company. So what? Habits that build trust will therefore have a bigger impact than “pitching better or faster.” Habits like asking more questions, listening with empathy, staying in discovery, sharing stories (not only facts and figures), are all trust building habits.
Automate and systematize your life: Relying on willpower is a recipe for failure. Instead, design your ideal habits into your contexts so that they’re easier to do, easier to remember and more likely to happen. Finding it hard to remember to set the next meeting in this sales meeting? Build it into the agenda!
When you don’t know, just try something: We all know how it feels to freeze in the face of uncertainty and simply not knowing what to do next. The only way we encourage ourselves back into action is by taking an educated guess and simply trying something. We can ACT our way into a new way of being! Practice does make permanent, and practice is a substitute for courage. All good reasons to act, to get feedback and to fail and learn, rather than sit in fear.
Time-block your day: Yes, you can fit in your mid-morning coffee break or the guilty pleasures in your day that keep you sane. When email flows into meetings, flows into calls, it’s all a hot mess of self delusional multitasking. Set an hour for email and do only that. Set an hour for preparing a proposal and do ONLY that. It’s the focus that comes from doing ONLY one thing that really created progress. We underestimate the cost of task shifting and often end the day having started 50 tasks and completed none!
Now what?
Remember the golden rules:
Only try to change one habit at a time.
First remove a bad habit (or less good one) so you have space for the new one to grow.
Remember we don’t have habits, our habits have us! So, master the skills of Context Design so that the habits that “have you” are the ones that serve you. Companion vs Captor!
Good luck!