Establishing Lifestyle Foundation Systems vs. Everyday Habits
Systems and Habits
Now, I want to basically STOP talking about GOALS.
Instead, I want to focus on YOU.
- Who you are
- What you are doing
- Where you are now
- Where you are headed in the future
All of these facts are based upon what you do day-to-day.
To be honest, setting goals - both big and small - they simply are NOT going to make you successful.
What? Really!? Then why the heck did we spend so much time and energy setting goals?
Because goals help us expose our passions, desires, and wants. They help us dream big. They give us vision and focus.
However, goals don’t bring happiness.
A little secret...
So we need to be careful here.
The secret to happiness is how we live our daily life. It is finding purpose, fulfillment, and joy in the life we live now - TODAY.
Goals often distract us from the present.
While it is extremely valuable to know your desired destination, it is more IMPORTANT to enjoy your life journey now.
How do we enjoy life today while staying on the path to our desired destination? By creating positive, healthy, and rewarding habits.
Live your life NOW
How do we stick to these habits? By creating an automatic system.
Habits can provide success and satisfaction in our daily life. And when we build a system for these habits, they lead us to our larger life goals.
HABITS
Habits are core to our being. They create our daily routines and comfort (or discomfort). They are our actions (and even thoughts or feelings) which have been created over time in our daily life.
Some habits are conscious choices and others are passive routines which we have allowed to remain in our life without being mindful of their powerful impact.
Today, I want you to be mindful, aware, and conscious of the many habits you have in your life. Let’s take a look at them and evaluate them. Then let’s improve or eliminate each one.
Habit:
The definition of a habit is "a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up."
It also means a "practice, custom, pattern, routine, style, convention, policy, way, manner, mode, norm, tradition, a matter of course, or rule."
In psychology, a habit is "an automatic reaction to a specific situation."
Once we understand our personal habits, we can then determine if they are in alliance with our personal values and goals.
Once we have the right habits we can create our life systems which result in strong foundations for change, improvement, and growth. Thus, we have created our daily path to the lifestyle we desire.
Using our habits to create new systems helps us to achieve our goals automatically. While we have created our Big Hairy Audacious Goal and broken it down into our smaller SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound), it is truly our habits which make or break our success in each of these endeavors.
SYSTEMS
How do we automate our path to success and happiness? By creating a system which automatically reinforces our positive habits and allows us to continually implement new habits and routines. With a simple system of routines, we can achieve daily success and stay on track to our goals.
It’s important to acknowledge that many new habits are often created and implemented based upon our individual willpower. Some people have very strong willpower and some of us don’t. Thus, it is NOT realistic to simply make a list of new healthy habits and say, “Just do it.”
Most of us “just don’t.”
Face it, we’re lazy, distracted, tired, and overwhelmed. So instead of trying to force new habits or routines into our lives, let’s instead create a system based on events which are already occurring.
Successful systems are based upon automatic responses or actions which eliminate our dependence on willpower.
We can simply create chains of events around our pre-existing routines.
System:
By definition, a system is "a set of principles or procedures according to which something is done; an organized scheme or method." It also means "method, technique, process, procedure, approach, practice, line, way, manner, mode, or modus operandi."
Focus
So let’s focus now on our system instead of our goals. (The goals simply keep us focused on the big picture.)
Goals vs Habits vs Systems
Let’s compare these different approaches to better understand how all three work together on our behalf.
There is no one solution to designing your lifestyle. Rather, it is a combination of techniques and methods being consistently applied over time that creates your success.
Goals are important. However, simply focusing on goals can be limiting. To be honest, you may develop such tunnel vision that you miss additional opportunities or life itself! Goals are great for giving us focus. They are also helpful in defining our passions.
Our habits create our lifestyle and develop our personal values over time. Habits are windows into our soul and current situation. It is often these repetitive activities which determine what we achieve or not.
Additionally, many people have only implemented additional habits via willpower. Thus, the more you struggle with willpower the less successful you may be with creating new habits. We’re going to use proven, systematic methods for change which eliminate the need for willpower. Instead, we take the path of least resistance.
Every small habit creates an opportunity to enlarge our life system (or a distraction/hindrance to achieve our desires if it is a toxic habit).
Understanding and controlling our habits is a constantly evolving and developing process. By having an understanding and overall perspective of how we each “click,” we can more easily implement new habits into our system while eliminating any unwanted habits.
Systems are magical because they are independent of willpower.
Systems are created by implementing reactions to different cues or triggers in our environment. Our super-power comes from using our desired daily habits in a system that allows us to painlessly and continually tweak to improve ourselves and our lives.
"A goal is a specific objective that you either achieve or don’t sometime in the future. A system is something you do on a regular basis that achieves your odds of happiness in the long run. If you do something every day, it’s a system. If you’re waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it’s a goal." Thus, people “succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do.” - Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert cartoons and best-selling author of How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big
Discover Your Habits
A habit has three components:
- Cue (Reminder) which is based on environmental, internal, and external triggers,
- Action (Routine) = the actual habit, and
- Reward
To be a habit, an action needs to:
- Occur regularly
- Be cued or triggered by a situation, event, or environmental factor
- Result without thought
Basically, a habit is a repetitive action you engage in frequently and automatically as a response to something in your environment.
Habits can be positive such as brushing your teeth or going to the gym OR they can be negative such as smoking or chewing your nails.
Regardless, each habit has a cue, action, and reward (also known as Reminder-Routine-Reaction).
The most important thing right now is to identify your habits/routines that you currently have in our life. These actions have a very strong impact and influence your life trajectory.
Journal your daily behavior:
- Outline your daily routine to see your patterns and actions.
- Review your weekly routines and monthly routines to see the patterns there also.
- Determine which habits you would like to alter/eliminate and put that to the side. We will return to that later.
- Acknowledge the daily habits that you are happy to keep and maintain. Determine what the cue and reward are for each of these actions/habits/routines.
Examples of Basic Habits/Routines:
- Alarm clock rings, hit the snooze button, return to sleep (reward = more sleep)
- Alarm clock rings, you get up to turn off sound, start the day (reward = up on-time)
- Open cabinet to get toothbrush, see vitamins next to toothbrush, take vitamins (reward = healthy habit)
- Phone rings, answer, talk to the caller (reward = find out who it is)
How to Create Your System of New Habits
The best time to add a new habit/routine/behavior is immediately after an established habit/routine/behavior. So we simply insert an extra small detail into our pre-existing world. We’re not trying to change what we do at all. We are simply enhancing it by chaining a new event to the routine. We use a series of events as the trigger for the new one.
For example, if I want to improve my balance and sneak in some extra yoga time during the day, I can stand in tree pose while brushing my teeth. I know I will brush my teeth so I simply add this small act(or chain this new habit to an old one). Perhaps I leave a post-it note on my toothbrush for the first month. After a while it will feel unnatural to my brush my teeth without standing in tree pose.
So if I brush my teeth, then I will stand in tree pose.
If X, then I will Y. (X = Cue & Y= Action)
Brushing my teeth equals my cue and standing in tree pose (completing some good yoga daily) equals my action.
So your easiest way to create a new habit (and a new automatic system) is to add it to your existing routine/cue. You simply add it to the chain of events.
Plan Your Success
Once you can see your natural routine chains, you can easily plan the changes you want to implement. Planning is key to success. Mentally prepare for your success.
Furthermore, to establish your new habit, create environmental cues. Use the cues that already exist in your daily life and chain the new one to the string of events.
Breaking Bad Habits
If you want to break a habit, PLAN and remove them. How? Replace it with another habit which provides the reward you are craving from your old habit.
For example, if you indulge during your coffee break perhaps it is not the coffee, cake, or soda that you desire. Bring alternative “goodies” such as nuts, chewing gum, flavored soda water, etc. and experiment to find a satisfactory replacement.
Determine what the reward is and focus on that. Is it the socializing, the eating, the drinking, or the movement from one place to another that makes you happiest. Once you know your reward, enhance that while removing the negative habit.
Motivation
The secret to success with habits/routines which ultimately create your system towards lifestyle change is to focus on your rewards. Get to know yourself and discover which rewards are your strongest motivators.
Rewards are what motivate us.
Rewards have three key features. They are:
- immediate after the action
- related to your action
- small and feel natural, good, and appropriate
As we focus on these habits that exist and the habits we want to implement, stick to your GOALS while creating relevant habits with rewards that motivate you.
Here is where we put it all together.
Remember, it is important to remove bad habits - obviously. However, be careful not to overload yourself with too many new “good” habits if they do not directly help you achieve your life goals.
Keep it simple. Less is more. Add only that which is necessary and rewarding to help you achieve your goals in life.
And remember not to overdo it. Start small so that you can achieve success (REWARD) easily. For example, instead of inserting an hour workout into your schedule, start with three sun salutations which give you instant success. You can scale this later.
Celebrate the small achievements first!
Rewards
Achieving a reward is critical to creating a new habit. It is fundamental to our psyche. When we receive a positive reward for our actions, we continue to repeat the habit to achieve the reward again and again.
However, the reward needs to be something that you can only achieve from that action.
Additionally, rewards help us succeed because they make our actions/habits feel good.
One very important note about rewards: they must be the result of doing something that you naturally like. If you are doing something that you like and receive a reward, it is creating a positive imprint that you will repeat again and again.
***If you are trying to create a habit based upon gaining a reward, it will fail. (Forget trying to force yourself to do something you hate; it will never work.)
And ironically, research shows that by creating larger rewards for our habits, we succeed less. A larger reward redirects our natural focus from doing what we like to doing something strictly for the reward - and then we do the action/routine/habit less.
I guess we can’t trick ourselves.
So promising yourself some huge reward (clothes, travel, a splurge of sugar) at the end of the week or month based upon your ability to perform predetermined tasks is not near as successful as creating routines with instant small gratifications (rewards) for doing something you really want. The first is based upon willpower and focus while the last is simple cause and effect.
Keep it simple.
Reminder - Routine - Reward.
Your Habits to Success
Every habit you have follows the same step pattern
- Reminder (the CUE/trigger that initiates your behavior)
- Routine (the ACTION/habit/behavior you perform)
- Reward (the benefit you gain from your behavior)
A good reminder occurs naturally. It does not rely on self-motivation and it does not require you to consciously remember your new habit.
The most successful reminders make it easy to start by chaining your new behavior into a sequence of events that you already perform.
Start your new system for success:
- Focus on your goals to decide what new habits you need to implement while eliminating any defeating bad habits.
- Use your pre-existing routines as environmental triggers to cue/create your new habits. (Habits you like and want to do!)
- Mindfully enjoy the rewards of your actions. Be conscious of how you feel and celebrate each success! You will naturally want to do this again and again.
Lastly, remember to share your questions, thoughts, and inspirations with your tribe! We are here to share your journey!