How to actually make your habits stick

In this weeks blog post I want to talk about habits, which are in my opinion probably the single most valuable thing when it comes to success and achieving your goals. I want to give you a step by step guide, how to build strong long lasting habits. Many people struggle with sticking to their habits, they make those big new years resolutions, start with a motivated mindset, but lose this motivation after a few weeks and fall back into old behaviour patterns. But let me tell you, it is actually not that hard to make your habits stick, if you keep in mind some key concepts.

But before defining a habit and trying to implement it into your daily life, you should always define a goal first, because without a clear vision of what you actually want to achieve, you wont stick to the habit. I could probably write an own blogpost about setting goals, but I want to give you a quick introduction here. You have probably all heard of the SMART-Goalsetting-System, but if not, let me give you a brief definition. A goal Should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound. I wont dive deeper into this, but while defining your goals you should keep those 5 principles in mind. Further more you shouldn´t tackle more than 3-5 goals at a time, because let's be real it is just not realistic to achieve that many goals and the more goals you set, the less time you actually have, to invest into each goal and make progress in it.

After we have defined our goals, we can now continue with defining our habits. Brake down each goal you have defined into smaller junks. What do you have to do each day to make progress on this specific goal ? Let me give you an example: When you set the goal for yourself that you want to lose 5 kilos of weight in the next 5 weeks, you now have to think about how big your calorie deficit has to be to achieve this goal. Let's say you need a deficit of 200 calories a day to make the right amount of progress each day. Now you have a micro goal for each day to hit and a habit to focus on a daily basis. While defining this micro goal for each day it is really important, that it is actually achievable. Defining too ambitous goals, will probably lead to you quitting your habits after a few days.

After defining our goals and the habits we need to stick to each day to achieve this goal, let's get to the juicy part of actually following your habits. The single most important thing in my opinion when it comes to making your habits stick for a long period of time, is the right enviroment. What do I mean by that ? Let's get back to our weight loss goal and think about the enviroment we need to sorround ourselves with, to actually make progress on achieving that goal. What do you think will make it more likely to stick to a healthy diet ? Surrounding yourself with people who eat unhealthy and having unhealthy snacks readily available or being sorrounded by people, who try to achieve the same goal and having your fridge filled with healthy food ? Definitely the second choice. In generall you have to reduce the time to get into a good habit and make it as hard as possible to follow bad habits. Tailor your enviroment to encourage the good habit you want to follow.

When we defined the perfect enviroment for sticking to our habits, we can think about additional systems that will make it more likely to follow those habits long term. There are two ways to do that. Either you implement external systems or you just believe into your self discipline, but let's be real we are no David Goggins, so we have to rely on external systems to follow our habits. There are two ways to use external systems to make your habits stick, the soft and the hard way. Tools like habit tracking apps, fall into the soft camp, but don't get me wrong, those tools can be great, when it comes to sticking to our goals. They give us a visual written record of progress over time. Most of them work with the don't brake the chain technique. They encourage us to follow our habits each day, because if we don't, we brake the chain. Habit tracking habits are a good start, but we have to raise harder guns, it those soft external systems don't work. Then we have to make use of other tools. A simple way is getting an acountability partner. An accountability partner is someone, who holds you accountable. This can be a friend, who knows which habit you are trying to achieve. When you don't stick to your habits, you could punish yourself, by having to give money to your friend.

While committing to a habit, you should always track your progress by building some kind of tracking system and evaluating how things are going after specific periods of time. When you realize that your daily habit was too ambitious, step back a little and define a smaller goal, which is easier to achieve.

I hope you got some value out of this article and I encouraged you to implement some knew healthy habits, you always wanted to implement into your life and to actually stick to those habits for a long period of time. But always keep in mind, that failure will eventually come and this is actually a good thing, if you learn from those mistakes and make some changes afterwards.

Cheers Emil