Habit is
stronger than reason. - George Santayana
And it
all began with one small win. – The Power of Habits
Take
control of your habits. Take control of
your life. – Success Begins Today
Over the last couple of weeks, Terri’s Tuesday Tip of the
Week has been discussing various habits that can be incorporated into our lives
including the One-Touch Rule and the 1% Rule, which states to spend only
one-percent of your day working towards improving yourself and over a year you
will have improved 3800% (see blog post from February 21st to learn
more). The question then arises about
how to incorporate these new habits into our lives. Charles Guhigg states in his book Habits: Why We Do What We Do in Life and
Work:
We know that a habit
cannot be eradicated; it must, instead, be replaced. If we keep the same cue and the same reward,
a new routine can be inserted. But
that’s not enough. For a habit to stay
changed, people must believe change is possible. And most often, that belief only emerges with
the help of a group.
Tony Dungy, one of the greatest football coaches of all
times, incorporated this concept with his football teams. During practices, his goal was to train his
teams to stop thinking and instead react to normal on-field cues. When they experienced a normal “cue”, they inserted
a new routine (response) and received the same reward. By continually practicing this process, it
became automatic during football games. Dungy
used this process with both the Buccaneers and Colts and both of these teams
greatly improved.
In her article “BEHAVIORAL MANAGEMENT: The Power of Habit to
Determine Our Behavior”, Deborah Mackin gives a great example we can all
probably relate to. When we hear the “ding”
of a new email, we immediately stop what we are doing to deal with the email in
anticipation that it might be important.
Our “reward” might be that we caught an important email early and resolved
the issue. To change, we have to hear
the “ding” of a new email (cue), develop a different routine of waiting to
review email until a set time (response) and still feel rewarded when we are
able to clean out our email before we leave for the day (reward).
CHALLENGE: If
this concept can be used to improve football players or cleaning out email
Inboxes, then why not use it to incorporate new habits into our
lives? With incorporating this process,
what new habits do you want to implement in your life?
Resources
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