Everyone has experienced the initial burst of good intentions and enthusiasm that go into New Year’s resolutions followed shortly afterwards by the inevitable lapse to old habits. This applies to both personal resolutions on things like diet and exercise and to business-related resolutions like communicating with clients, interacting with prospects or motivating your team.
Often people blame the failure to follow through on resolutions to lack of discipline. In an article last week, I made the case that the key to any important change, whether in personal life or in business, lies not in greater discipline but rather in creating the right habits. While it does take discipline to create new habits, once those habits have become entrenched, they happen automatically. As a simple example, it doesn’t take discipline to brush our teeth in the morning, because that has become part of our routine that takes no thought.
Earlier this month my free webinar outlined five steps to creating new habits that can put your practice on auto pilot. This week and next, I will outline research on the tactics that go into creating the new habits that will turn your personal and business resolutions into reality.
Focus on one or two new habits
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Pick one or two habits on which to focus. Remember that research has found that discipline is a muscle that gets exhausted with effort and the more habits you try to change, the lower the odds of success on achieving any of them. To give yourself the absolute best chance of building a new habit, pick one and only one high-impact habit that you’d like to change.
Don’t forget that this exercise is designed to entrench a new habit into your routine over a 90-day period. If successful, in three months you will move on and repeat the exercise with another high-impact habit.
Be ambitious – but with a reality check
Heidi Halvorson Grant at the Columbia Motivation Science Center is among the leading researchers on what it takes to create new habits. One finding is that your goals have to be ambitious and stretch you to activate your subconscious. At the same time, they have to be in the realm of reality.
Halvorson suggests a technique called mental contrasting to come up with the right balance of ambition and reality. On a blank piece of paper, write down a possible new habit – say identifying 20 clients with whom you will meet, along with their accountant, to ensure that their portfolios are tax efficient. Then underneath that write down how you will be better off if you do this consistently; beside that write down an obstacle to making that request. Then write down another benefit and another obstacle – and continue this process until you are out of benefits and obstacles.
Having done that, decide if you want to go ahead. An experiment at New York University showed that, provided that the expectation of success is reasonably high, mental contrasting leads to greater energy, more immediate action and higher commitment to your goal.
Expect success
Another finding is that you need to be positive about the odds of success. When research was done with obese adults embarking on a weight-loss program, those who truly believed they would succeed lost on average 26 pounds more than those who were uncertain about their chances of success
Anticipate setbacks
You need to be positive, but you also need to be realistic about how hard this will be. Halvorson Grant talks about the “planning fallacy” in which we almost always underestimate how hard it will be to achieve an ambitious goal. That’s why you need to anticipate challenges, setbacks and obstacles and go into this saying to yourself that “this will be tough.”
Research was conducted with people taking on challenging tasks – losing weight, finding a job, recovering from hip surgery. In every instance, those who went into this believing that it would be hard were significantly more successful than those who thought it would be easy.
Be specific
In his book, Making Habits, Breaking Habits, psychologist Jeremy Dean pointed out that most goals are vague and in fact more a wish than a plan. To effect change, you need to be specific and concrete, focusing on the precise behavior you want to achieve in the exact situation. To trigger new habits, he advocates a technique he calls “If ... then” or “When I….” Some examples:
Instead of |
Use If … then or When I … |
I want to eat more vegetables (which itself better than I want to lose weight or eat more healthy foods) |
If I am having my mid-morning coffee, Then I will eat carrot sticks |
I will get more exercise |
If I have to take fewer than three flights of stairs, I will take the stairs rather than the elevator |
I will suggest to top clients that I will get in touch with their accountant |
When preparing the agenda for a review with a top 20 client, I will add Ensuring Tax Efficiency |
I will do a better job of following up with potential prospects I meet at Rotary |
When I meet someone new at Rotary, I will ask for their card and offer mine, then send them a linked in request and add them to the CRM for invitations to client lunches |
Move at the right pace
One issue is how quickly you should implement new habits – should you aim for incremental or dramatic change. The research is that incremental steps are the best way to effect change (think about the sorry track record for crash diets) – the key is to find the sweet spot between moving too fast to be able to sustain the pace and too slowly to establish momentum
Change the triggers in your day
Jeremy Dean’s research shows that one way to change habits is to alter the routine and context that triggers those habits. So if you want to start exercising in the morning, get up at a different time and change your normal breakfast. If you want to change your morning routine, look for a different way to start your day. If you want to incorporate some positive new habits into your weekly team meeting, look at holding it at a different time or moving the venue. If you want to change your enthusiasm level in the afternoon, mix up the people with whom you normally have lunch.
Many existing habits are triggered by an event – and one way to change habits is to alter the event that triggers them.
Next week’s article will provide some additional insights on what it takes to create new habits in your routine, tapping into recent research from Duke, the University of Chicago, Stanford and the University of London.
Dan Richards conducts programs to help advisors gain and retain clients and is an award winning faculty member in the MBA program at the University of Toronto. To see more of his written commentaries, go to www.danrichards.com or here for his videos.
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