Incase you missed the part 1, it would cost you nothing to scroll up my blog and start from there in order to understand it fully. Like I said lastly, i would be starting from the 4th table of contents(sub-topic).
- Identity-Based Habits: How to Actually
Stick to Your Goals For the Long-Term
We've covered the science of habit formation. But in the real world, there is often a difference between theory and practice.
Whenever I write, I do my best to not merely share ideas backed by science, but also to highlight realworld lessons that make it easier for you to put those ideas into practice.
This is especially important when it comes to building better habits. We all want to become better people — stronger and healthier, more creative and more skilled, a better friend or family member. But even if we get really inspired and start doing things better, it’s tough to actually stick to new behaviors. It’s more likely that this time next year you’ll be doing the same thing
than performing a new habit with ease.
Luckily, you can use a strategy that I call “identitybased habits” to make change easier and stick to your goals over the longterm. Here's how it works...
What Remembering Names Can Teach You About Habits.
My girlfriend is great at remembering people’s names.Recently, she told me a story that happened when she was in high school. She went to a large tetiary institution and it was the first day of class. Many of the students had never met before that day.
The teacher went around the room and asked each person to introduce themselves. At the end, the teacher asked if anyone could remember everyone’s name.
My girlfriend raised her hand and proceeded to go around the room and accurately name all 30 or so people. The rest of the room was stunned. The guy next to her looked over and said, “I couldn’t even remember your name.”
She said that moment was an affirming experience for her. After that happened she felt like, “I’m the type of person who is good at remembering people’s names.”
Even today, she is great at remembering the names of anyone we come across.
Here’s what I learned from that story: In order to believe in a new identity, we have to prove it to ourselves.
Identity-Based Habits: How to Build Lasting Habits
The key to building lasting habits is focusing on creating a new identity first. Your current
behaviors are simply a reflection of your current identity. What you do now is a mirror image of the type of person you believe that you are (either consciously or subconsciously).
To change your behavior for good, you need to start believing new things about yourself.
Imagine how we typically set goals. We might start by saying “I want to lose weight” or “I want to get stronger.” If you’re lucky, someone might say, “That’s great, but you should be more specific.” So then you say, “I want to lose 20 pounds” or “I want to squat 300 pounds.” These goals are centered around our performance or our appearance.
Performance and appearance goals are great, but they aren’t the same as habits. If you’re already doing a behavior, then these types of goals can help drive you forward. But if you’re trying to start a new behavior, then I think it would be far better to start with an identity–based goal.
The image below shows the difference between identity–based goals and performance and appearance–based goals.
The interior of behavior change and building better habits is your identity. Each action you perform is driven by the fundamental belief that it is possible. So if you change your identity (the type of person that you believe that you are), then it’s easier to change your actions.
The reason why it’s so hard to stick to new habits is that we often try to achieve a performance or appearance–based goal without changing our identity. Most of the time we try to achieve results before proving to ourselves that we have the identity of the type of person we want to become. It should be the other way around.
The Recipe for Sustained Success
Changing your beliefs isn’t nearly as hard as you might think. There are two steps.
Decide the type of person you want to be.
Prove it to yourself with small wins.
Note:I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to start with incredibly small steps. The goal is not to achieve results at first, the goal is to become the type of person who can achieve those things.
For example, a person who works out consistently is the type of person who can become strong.
Develop the identity of someone who works out first, and then move on to performance and appearance later. Start small and trust that the results will come as you develop a new identity. On the next page, you'll find five examples of how you can use identitybased habits in real life.
Example 1: Want to lose weight?
Identity: Become the type of person who moves more every day.
Small win: Buy a pedometer. Walk 50 steps when you get home from work. Tomorrow, walk 100 steps. The day after that, 150 steps. If you do this 5 days per week and add 50 steps each day, then by the end of the year, you’ll be walking over 10,000 steps per day.
Example 2: Want to become a better writer?
Identity: Become the type of person who writes 1,000 words every day.
Small win: Write one paragraph each day this week.
Example 3: Want to become strong?
Identity: Become the type of person who never misses a workout.
Small win: Do pushups every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
Example 4: Want to be a better friend?
Identity: Become the type of person who always stays in touch.
Small win: Call one friend every Saturday. If you repeat the same people every 3 months, you’ll stay close with 12 old friends throughout the year.
Example 5: Want to be taken seriously at work?
Identity: become the type of person who is always on time.
Small win: Schedule meetings with an additional 15–minute gap between them so that you can go from meeting to meeting and always show up early.
What is Your Identity?
In my experience, when you want to become better at something, proving your identity to
yourself is far more important than getting amazing results. This is especially true at first. If you want to get motivated and inspired, then feel free to watch a YouTube video, listen to your favorite song. But don’t be surprised if you burn out after a week. You can’t rely on being motivated to make lasting changes in your life. You have to become the type of person you want to be, and that starts with proving your new identity to yourself.
If you’re looking to make a change, then I say stop worrying about results and start worrying about your identity. Become the type of person who can achieve the things you want to achieve.
Build the habit now. The results can come later.
Combining Strategies for Maximum Success
Identitybased habits offer a framework through which to view your goals. The 3 R's of habit change provide a plan for achieving your new identity. Combining both of these ideas can make change easier for you overall.
In other words, identitybased habits keep you focused on the right things: like starting small, building your identity, and not worrying about results. Meanwhile, the 3 R's of habit change.
make sure that you do things in the right way: like linking your new habit to a current behavior and rewarding yourself for a job well done.
5.THE BEST WAY TO START YOUR NEW HABIT
If you’re serious about doing things better than you are now – in other words, if you're serious about sticking to good habits – then you have to start small.
Imagine the typical habits, good or bad: Brushing your teeth. Putting your seatbelt on. Biting your nails.
These actions are small enough that you don’t even think about them. You simply do them automatically. They are tiny actions that become consistent patterns.
Wouldn’t it make sense that if we wanted to form new habits, the best way to start would be to make tiny changes that our brain could quickly learn and automatically repeat?
What if you started thinking of your life goals, not as big, audacious things that you can only achieve when the time is right or when you have better resources or when you finally catch your big break … but instead as tiny, daily behaviors that are repeated until success becomes
inevitable?
What if losing 50 pounds wasn’t dependent on a researcher discovering the perfect diet or you finding a superhuman dose of willpower, but hinged on a series of tiny habits that you could always control? Habits like walking for 20 minutes per day, drinking 8 glasses of water per day, eating two meals instead of three.
Too often we get obsessed with making life–changing transformations. I believe you would make more progress by focusing on lifestyle behaviors.
★ Losing 50 pounds would be life–changing, drinking 8 glasses of water per day is a new
type of lifestyle.
★ Publishing your first book would be life–changing, emailing a new book agent each day is a new type of lifestyle.
★ Running a marathon would be life–changing, running 3 days per week is a new type of lifestyle.
★ Earning an extra $20,000 each year would be life–changing, working an extra 5 hours per week as a freelancer is a new type of lifestyle.
★ Squatting 100 more pounds would be life–changing, squatting 3 days per week is a new type of lifestyle.
Do you see the difference?
I think the following quote from BJ Fogg, a professor at Stanford University, sums this idea up nicely.
If you plant the right seed in the right spot, it will grow without further coaxing. I believe this is the best metaphor for creating habits.
The “right seed” is the tiny behavior that you choose. The “right spot” is the sequencing
— what it comes after. The “coaxing” part is amping up motivation, which I think has
nothing to do with creating habits. In fact, focusing on motivation as the key to habits
is exactly wrong.
Let me be more explicit: If you pick the right small behavior and sequence it right, then
you won’t have to motivate yourself to have it grow. It will just happen naturally, like a
good seed planted in a good spot.
—BJ Fogg
How great is that?
The typical approach is to dive into the deep end as soon as you get a dose of motivation, only to fail quickly and wish you had more willpower as your new habit drowns. The new approach is to wade into the shallow water, slowly going deeper until you reach the point where you can swim whether you’re motivated or not.
Daily habits — tiny routines that are repeatable — are what make big dreams a reality.
- HOW TO FIT NEW HABITS INTO YOUR LIFE
Knowing how to make changes is one thing, but fitting new goals into your life is
something else entirely.Making changes is tough. Whenever your schedule gets crazy, the inertia of life can pull you
away from your goals and right back into your old habits.How can you overcome this tendency to fall off course and make time for new goals in your
schedule?
Using the strategies already mentioned in this guide – like the 3 R's of habit change and
identitybased habits – will help keep you on track.
But those strategies aren't the only tools at your disposal. In this section, I'll share another way to stick to good habits that doesn't require incredible doses of willpower or remarkable motivation. I'll also share two examples of how I've used this strategy successfully in my own
life.
The Problem With How We Usually Set Goals
If you’re anything like the typical human, then you have dreams and goals in your life. In fact, there are probably many things — large and small — that you would like to accomplish.
That’s great, but there is one common mistake we often make when it comes to
setting goals. (I know I’ve committed this error many times myself.)
The problem is this: we set a deadline, but not aschedule. We focus on the end goal that we want to achieve and the deadline we want to do it by. We say things like, “I want to lose 20 pounds by the summer” or “I want to add 50 pounds to my bench
press in the next 12 weeks.”
The problem with this strategy is that if we don’t achieve the arbitrary timeline that we set in the beginning, then we feel like a failure … even if we are better off than we were at the start. The end result, sadly, is that we often give up if we don’t reach our goal by the initial deadline.Here’s the good news: there’s a better way and it’s simple.
The Power of Setting a Schedule, Not a Deadline
In my experience, a better way to approach your goals and build good habits is to set a schedule to operate by rather than a deadline to perform by. Instead of giving yourself a deadline to accomplish a particular goal by (and then feeling like a
failure if you don’t achieve it), you should choose a goal that is important to you and then set a schedule to work towards it consistently.That might not sound like a big shift, but it is.
The Idea in Practice
Most of the time, I try to be a practitioner of my ideas and not just someone who shares their opinion, so allow me to explain this strategy by using two real examples from my own life.
Example 1: Writing
I’ve been delivering two articles per week, every week. Sometimes the article is shorter than expected, sometimes it’s not as compelling as I had hoped, and sometimes it’s not as useful as it could be … but it gets out to the world nonetheless.
Of course, I didn't always operate on a MondayThursday schedule. In fact, I came up with reasons for actively avoiding a schedule. I told myself, “I do my best writing when I'm inspired, so I'll just wait until I get the urge to write.”
I assumed that if I wasn't doing my best work, then I shouldn't be doing it at all. The problem with that strategy is that my output was erratic at best.
It took me awhile to realize it, but it's not about always doing your best work, it's about doing the best you can on a consistent basis.
Once I stopped focusing on results awnd simply held myself to a consistent schedule, my workand my output improved. In the first 6 months after I started writing two times per week, I wrote more in quantity and better in quality than in the previous two years.
It doesn't matter what you're doing, if you only work when you feel motivated, then you'll never be consistent enough to make significant impact on your life.
Example 2: Exercise
In August 2012, I decided that I wanted to do 100 pushups in a row with strict form. When I tried it the first time, I only got 36.
In the past, I might have set a deadline for myself: “Do 100 pushups by December 31st.”
This time, I decided to set a schedule for my workouts. I started doing pushup workouts every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. There was no total pushup goal for any single workout. The goal is simply to do the workout. (Just like there is no single goal for any one article I write. The goal is simply to write the article.)
I'm still on my way to 100 consecutive pushups (my current best is 80 in a row), but in the 9months that have followed since I began, I have kept my Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule and completed over 100 pushup workouts.
Focus on the Practice, Not the Performance.
Do you see how the two examples above are different than most goals we set for ourselves?
In both cases (writing and exercise), I made consistent progress towards my goals not by setting a deadline for my performance, but by sticking to a schedule. The focus is on doing the action, not on achieving X goal by a certain date.
If you want to be the type of person who accomplishes things on a consistent basis, then give yourself a schedule to follow, not a deadline to race towards.
However I will stop here for today...next time, i would be treating the 7th-9th table of contents(subtopics). Have a nice day ahead great steemites. Drop your nice comments below and follow me as well 