Habit building is a transformative tool to implement change in your life. This post is all about developing habits to see the change you want to see in your life.
Before tackling the habit of habit tracking, we must consider what habits we want to develop. This comes down to the principle introduced in Atomic Habits- who do you want to become?1 I might add to that to say what change do you want to see in your life? Habits allow you to transform your life into the life you want and become the person you want to be.
Habits result in long-term and intentional lifestyle changes. Let’s walk through 4 steps to build habits that will change your life.
Group Your Habits: Areas of Your Life
To start brainstorming what habits you want to build, it is easier to start by grouping habits under different categories of your life. List the different areas of your life that are important to you. Here are some examples to get you started.
- Faith/ Spiritual
- Health/ Physical
- Mental/ Wellbeing
- Personal
- Recreational
- Career
- Relationships/ Friendships
- Family
- Spouse/ Marriage
- Children/ Parenthood
- Intellectual/ Development/ Education
Who Do You Want to Become
Now that you have you’ve categorized the important buckets of your life, you can start to think about who you want to become in each area of your life. Create statements under each heading that encapsulate who you want to be.
Now that we have put into simple terms who we want to become, we can slowly build our habits around this statement to one day know that we have become this statement. Habits are all about progressive building. We must understand and accept that habits don’t develop overnight and it’s a process of stepping stones. We won’t become runners in days or weeks but we can start to build the habit of becoming a runner over days and weeks.
Build the Habit
Now that we have our statements of who we want to become, we can transform this into a habit statement.
When creating a habit around your “becoming statement,” we must ensure that the habit is specific, measurable, and attainable. Referring to the example above, we could simply say we will start to run every week, but how often, how long, how far? Vague habits can hinder your progression, and motivation, and will be hard to track whether you’ve stayed consistent or not.
Stay Consistent
Habits are all about consistency. Consistency will result in seamlessly incorporating this habit as part of your routine and lifestyle. Flossing used to never be a part of my oral hygiene routine. It was certainly a task that I didn’t do as easily as I did brush my teeth. However, I became determined to make flossing a part of my routine. This habit was built on reminders. Brushing my teeth is an unconscious habit. If I want to go to bed, I must complete my nighttime routine which includes brushing my teeth. However, to incorporate flossing into this routine I needed reminders and cues. Leaving floss picks where they were easily accessible, near my toothbrush where I could see it in plain sight served as the easiest reminder. With these reminders and consistency, flossing has now too become a task where my hand reaches for the floss pick before I even consciously realize I’ve started my nighttime routine.
Habits allow us to commit to changing our lives for the long term and becoming who we want to be. Take some time to reflect on who you want to become in each facet of your life and build attainable and realistic habits. Year over year, month over month, see how your life transforms with one small habit at a time.
1 Clear, James. Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results : An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. New York, New York, Avery, an imprint of Penguin Random House, 2018.
