Having Trouble Getting Habits to Stick? Here’s the single most powerful change you can make.

No matter how hard we try, maintaining new habits seems to be one of the hardest things to get right.

In the midst of our current climate with the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of us have also experienced a nosedive with our productivity, habits, and routines. That’s understandable given that this experience is unprecedented and extremely stressful in nature.

However, I’m a huge advocate for self-development and I truly believe that self-awareness and constant learning are necessities in any circumstance.

We’ve all been forced to re-evaluate a LOT about our personal and professional lives, and in this article, I posit a re-evaluation on the way we view building habits and setting goals in these uncertain times.

No matter who you are, we’ve all set grand goals and have tried to build new healthful habits (or strip negative ones). It all sounds so simple and exciting on paper when planning our dreams and aspirations.

But the reality is that it’s so much easier to lose sight of the bigger picture and get derailed by trains of thought like:

• “Why am I subjecting myself to this pain in the gym?”
• “Why am I holding myself back from all that delicious food/shopping pleasure?”
• “Who in the right mind would study/hustle in the evenings after work?”

This article will look to build awareness of the prevailing (and unproductive) ‘clean the slate’ mentality that we take when building habits and should help enlighten a new perspective on how to tackle this hurdle.

Here’s a general outline of what we’ll cover:

1. Why we try to build new habits and goals, serving as the foundation for us to analyze what’s going wrong,
2. The current cycle of goal-setting and habit building that perpetuates itself (let’s say, around New Year’s Resolution ‘season’),
3. The ‘clean the slate’ mentality, and it’s negative impact on progress,
4. The ‘brick-by-brick’ mentality, and it’s positive impact on progress,
5. Strategies: mindset shifts and environmental cues to tackle the ‘clean the slate’ mentality and build a more sustainable approach to habit building.

Let’s get started!

Why do we try to build new habits? What purpose do goals serve?

Reflect on some of the goals you may have set for yourself recently.

If you review them carefully, you begin to realize that goals are simply representations of some picture of a better, improved state; something different from where or what we are right now.

In essence, you would never set a goal to just ‘stay as you are’, it just doesn’t make sense!

In conjunction, habits then simply feed into goals by providing us a track to follow; they split the goal into lines of manageable work to guide us towards progress.

Take this example:

A goal might be to be physically fit, healthier, and more active

As a result, the habits (or lines of work) that will eventually lead to that goal could include any combination of working out more consistently, meal prepping/diet control, healthy lifestyle routines, and so on.

From this, we see that the reason we pursue new habits and goals is because we’re unsatisfied with where we are; there’s some dissonance between our current and ideal states.

Goal-setting and the associated activities of planning and idealizing allow us to mentally reduce uncertainty, setting a target for ourselves to almost synthetically increase our chances for productivity and progress.

So with this foundational understanding, how do we go about pinpointing why we always find ourselves rebuilding and in a rut?

To do this, we’ll analyze the very cycle we go through when building any type of habit.

The Perpetual Cycle of Habit Building

There is a LOT of uncertainty (due to the sheer number of internal and external variables involved) in the likelihood of someone achieving their personal goals.

Think about it! There’s motivation at play, and work ethic, goal feasibility, distractions, sporadic life events, and so on.

But no matter where you are in your current goals and mindset, the one thing I can say for certain is that there exists a perpetual cycle we all experience when building new habits and goals.

I’ll be writing a separate article to go into detail of this cycle’s various stages and planes of transition, but for now, the general cycle framework goes as follows:

1. Dissatisfaction: unsatisfied with current state, a burning desire to change

Typically, this burn to change is not strong enough to instigate action in itself.

Either from internal awareness or external validation, judgement, or criticism, we’re sometimes met with a catalyst for change that is strong or abrupt enough to snap us out of our desensitized burn.

Then, we enter stage 2…

2. Ideation: Contemplating ideas for change, met with friction to take action

From our change catalyst, we begin to envision ideal states but are unable to take action due to friction from both confusion (how do I even start changing myself?) and overwhelm (there’s so much to learn, change, and do! This is too much!).

So long as our change catalyst remains present and strong in our minds, once we take steps toward setting realistic expectations and reducing friction to action, we can reduce confusion and overwhelm.

As a result, we enter stage 3…

3. Action: Planning and attempting, optimism & manic EXCITEMENT!

When you’re finally making strides of progress and ticking boxes, we’re met with new found confidence.

However, we’ll eventually feel very manic and over-optimistic about our momentum and we assume that high levels of motivation and ‘grinding’ things out will be sustainable.

Once things prove unsustainable and our expectations for progress becomes misaligned with the progress we’re actually realizing, we enter stage 4…

4. Slump: Habits prove difficult, loss of routine, drive & progress

Habits fall off, motivation and confidence dip, progress stalls, you know the drill…

But here’s where things can take a turn: we will either…

5. Re-enter…
Dissatisfaction: Rinse & Repeat from scratch,
OR
Action: Rinse & Repeat from where we are

Here’s a diagram with notation for the paths we can take after the SLUMP:

If we throw in the towel and submit to our failure, we re-enter the dissatisfaction stage. Unfortunately, this is the popular path for most of us.

Because we re-enter the dissatisfaction stage, we now need to wait for another change catalyst to push us into the next stage of ideation and so on; we’re essentially starting from scratch.

However, if we take a conscious approach to learning from our failures and applying them, we can re-enter the action stage and reignite our engines for continued progress.

And for the purposes of this article, I’ll highlight what I think to be one of the biggest reasons we fail in maintaining progress toward our goals…

Between the ACTION and SLUMP stages, failures are inevitable. However, not enough of us are taking a conscious approach to learning from our failures and applying our lessons learned to re-enter ACTION.

Instead, we’re cleaning the slate, starting the cycle from scratch and just hoping for the best.

Our biggest mistake in habit building: The ‘clean the slate’ mentality

The biggest mistake we make when trying to build new habits is employing a ‘clean the slate’ mentality. Because of it, we rarely trace back to why we failed in the first place, thus, limiting our potential.

In the planning of new habits and goals, the excitement for our better future clouds our ability to look back to understand what went wrong and how to go about things in a better way next time around.

At the start of a new year, when we’ve all set our new years resolutions (many of which are likely recurrences from past resolution lists), we feel the sense that ‘this year will be different’.

This is the fresh start effect: a period of increased motivation and optimism for even the grandest goals during a key temporal landmark like new years, birthdays, new school terms, etc.

We’re hoping that things turn out for the better because this year is just different.

In a sense, we’re excited and motivated to start anew because we can so readily scrap our past failures, almost as if everything that happened in the past didn’t happen and that, moving forward, we now have a clean slate that we can work with to paint the perfect picture.

But picture this:

What we don’t realize is that when a painting goes wrong in the first place, an artist can’t simply scrap their past failures and assume that the next painting will be better; there’s a great deal of internal reflection involved in understanding why that first painting failed.

More often than not, it’s the artist that needs to change.

It’s not that the old canvas was bad and this new one is better. The onus rests on the artist to improve themselves with new techniques and richer motives for painting more powerful pieces.

The view we take on building new habits is synonymous to the idea that we can just throw a failed painting away and start anew. We’re viewing habits as on/off switches that we can just turn on to instantly become that better person.

This view is warranted since it’s difficult for us to see the gradual climb and struggle of others through the lens of social media. Social media is a highlight reel and few reveal the behind-the-scenes trials and errors.

The truth is, habits take a very long time to internalize and transform into a lifestyle: the stage of continued habit maintenance (to the point where the once difficult habit is now just a part of you).

Instead, I suggest we build different expectations and perspectives toward building habits.

The better approach to habit building: The brick-by-brick mentality

If the ideal person or end goal that we’ve set was represented by a brick wall, the ‘clean the slate’ mentality is to try to build the wall all at once, and upon failure, scrap the entire wall and start from scratch.

In that perspective, this just doesn’t make sense.

Put simply: you can’t build a brick wall all at once.

It’s no wonder why so many of us feel like imposters and have trouble embodying the people we’re trying to become. We’re not giving ourselves enough time to develop into those beings through practice, iterations, learning, and grit.

Instead, we should be tackling these habits on a brick-by-brick approach: tackling each day as it comes and splitting the wall into tiny, manageable bricks.

Essentially, we’re cutting our large goals and habits down into not-so-overwhelming, ridiculously easy pieces.

In translation, this could literally mean micro-splitting your goal from ‘be more physically active’ into ‘I will do 10 pushups today’ and aiming to build incrementally on consistency and volume.

It might seem like micro-splitting your goals is unproductive, but we need to remind ourselves that for any worthwhile goal or accomplishment, the journey is a marathon, not a sprint; any single step you take, no matter how small, funnels into the bigger picture and is more effective than a sprint that burns you out.

In doing so, we are effectively reducing our friction to action, and when performed enough times, increases our likelihood for habit maintenance through practice and routine.

We also prevent ourselves from being overwhelmed by the entire brick wall, and can focus on properly laying today’s single brick with perfect practice.

From repeated practice, you start to learn new nuances related to your new habits that inevitably allow you to gain economies of scale (i.e., efficiency), slowly improving your ability to sustain habits and drive progress.

We’re not throwing our entire brick wall away when we fail; we’re starting from where we are, building on it bit-by-bit at our own pace, and maybe even going back to fix some of the older bricks already in place.

How to sustain new habits: Mindset shifts & tactical cues

So how do we integrate this mentality into our approach?

I’m a big proponent of using a combination of strategies in the following realms:

• Mindset shifts: these are cues, reminders, ‘affirmations’, ‘motivation’, and
• Tactical cues: most call these ‘life hacks’, but within this segment of strategies include environment design and goal-setting tactics, so not entirely ‘hacks’

I believe far too many of us fall prey into the thought that life ‘hacks’ alone will help us achieve our grandest goals, but I think a strategized balance of mentality and environmental design creates for a far more sustainable approach.

In essence, mentality shifts can serve as ‘motivational momentum’ which are sometimes enough to help us keep up with habits and goals, but the other half of the time, tactical cues help keep us on track by acting as guard rails.

Don’t be a pure life hacker, but also don’t rely on pure motivational talks to make you progress; employ balance!

Nonetheless, a few key mentality cues to integrate a sustainable habit approach include:

1. Embracing the brick-by-brick mentality: you can’t become your ideal state overnight. Take it slow and steady, and set tiny goals each day. As the habit becomes second nature, you’ll enter a state where you’re able to experiment and expand to focusing on fine-tuning because you’re not partitioning your efforts on maintaining the habit itself anymore.
2. Embody your new habits & visualize: Allow yourself to view new habits as an extension of your current self, as opposed to viewing them as ‘someone you want to eventually become’. Understand that you are merely a developing version of that ‘ideal’. By bridging this gap, we can more closely identify with our habits and reduce the overwhelm.
3. Embrace backtracking & failure: Change your perspective toward failure by accepting and planning for it when it occurs. Failure is inevitable; what matters is whether you re-enter the dissatisfaction stage or re-enter the action stage by learning from failure and applying it.

For a deeper dive into points (1) and (2), refer to my article on perfectionism & embracing failures.

For tactical cues, I suggest the following:

1. SMART & strategic goal-setting: Using the SMART framework, ensure that your goals are → specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. To illustrate…

Imagine a scenario where our final goal is to ‘be healthier, more fit, more active’. Using the SMART framework to outline our smaller habit goals…

Here’s an example of a non-SMART goal: “I plan to workout more”.
vs.
Here’s a SMART approach: “I plan to complete 20 beginner workouts for at least 20 minutes each session this month.”

Here’s a breakdown of why this is a SMART goal:
“I plan to complete 20 beginner (attainable with our current beginner skill level) workouts (relevant to our end goal) for at least 20 minutes each session (specific + measurable, no question on final result) this month (time-bound)”

2. Focus on frequency first, NOT output: Instead of overwhelming ourselves with an output-based goal like ‘post 5 blog posts in the next 3 months’, set a simple frequency-based goal to ‘perform weekly 30-minute writing sessions’. By starting small, we engrain the habit into our routine. Over time, we eventually become more capable of taking on longer sessions, pushing out more content, and so on. Frequency first, output next!

3. Reduce (or create) Friction to action: Use environmental design and cues to help guide you toward your goals. If your goal is to workout consistently, reduce friction by keeping your gym bag packed with everything you need in it. If your goal is to stop a negative habit, create friction by putting snacks, the TV remote, etc. in hard-to-reach cupboards.
Put simply: make positive habits easy and negative habits hard.

4. Build an accountability & tracking system: Track progress AND failures, systemize your approach to habits and goals to enable yourself to analyze failures and apply learnings. Tracking failures also helps to build self-awareness and practice third-party objectivity when reviewing why you failed. No excuses here, just hard facts!

Didn’t complete your 20 workouts? The data could show that there simply wasn’t enough time because of some sporadic life event… OR it could show that you did have time and simply lacked discipline in the moment. In either scenario, what matters is that there’s little room for blindness and more room for analysis and understanding. The truth is in the pudding (or data?).

Tactics/life hacks will serve as bumpers to help guide you along the way, but there will be moments where mentality cues and sheer motivation will be enough to carry you through progress.

The goal is to use these two strategies in conjunction, constantly trying to balance the momentum from both.

If you’re able to take only one thing away from this article, it would hopefully be this:

Self-development is an iterative cycle of incremental improvements.

The goal is to lay one brick at a time, not to clear the entire slate when we hit inevitable slumps.

Once you shift to the ‘brick-by-brick’ mentality, you can start to maintain sustainable progress by applying learnings and re-entering the action stage from any slump.

Start from the ground up, one brick at a time!

Thanks for reading!

Give a follow and keep a lookout for articles I’ve got coming up on data-driven accountability & tracking, the cycle of habit-building, and SMART goal-setting; super excited to share!

For now, stay safe and I’ll see you in the next one! 👋