The countdown widget of this blog informs me I have, “8 days to go” of my 30-day blogging/ brainstorming challenge. Over the previous 22 days I have delivered 9 posts. The purpose of attempting the 30-day challenge posted by Learning Rebels was to support me in the practice of making my work visible – a key plank of Working Out Loud. As Shannon Tipton puts it when we don’t do something we become rusty, “the more we turn our head away from what’s important, the harder it is to turn back.” Habits are things we repeat regularly and tend to occur subconsciously, they are powerful elements of our behaviours to learn how to develop.
So I am some way off target with my posts, technically not even reaching the 50% ‘success rate’. And I don’t think I have a habit, unless its for avoidance. While some of the issues have been fundamentally practical – e.g. I tend to spend my free days either in fields or on the sea, not areas renowned for connectivity – others are about my style of working and inevitably some are about how I feel about the process of ‘putting myself out there’ and its importance to me. Unfortunately what has resulted from this is one too many incidences of feeling guilt, a bit stressed and a sense of failure.
At some point last week in a supermarket aisle, while I was simultaneously attempting to remember the contents of the forgotten shopping list and work out when I was going to blog that day, I got to thinking that I was conscious of too many ‘rules’ about what I was supposed to be doing that day. Now a rule is fundamentally difference from a habit in definition, tone and ultimately helpfulness for changing behaviour; ‘explicit or understood regulations or principles governing conduct or procedure within a particular area of activity’. In that moment I felt like a jurisdiction on which the self-improving me was exercising great swathes of control, “don’t do this, do that”, “do this now”, accompanied by negative messages and penalties of guilt.
Now I am an inveterate self-improver, that’s one habit I’ve really got nailed. I just wrote a list and it transpires I am currently, simultaneously engaged in trying to adopt 8 new habits. Not solely, or even mainly, because I see a mass of inadequacies about myself but because it goes hand in hand with my constant desire for trying new things, challenges, learning and generally being interested in stuff.
As a coach and change agent really interested in what works in changing behaviour. Habits as Charles Duhigg evidences are one really important way of thinking about this, “the more you focus the more that focus becomes a habit”. And in ‘Happiness by Design’ Paul Dolan relates this idea to achieving the balance between pleasure and purpose that brings happiness, “attention acts as a production process that converts stimuli into happiness.”
So, I decided to not do as I was told (yes, by myself), stuff the blog posting and go to a field for the weekend – to be present, flexible and potentially spontaneous (not one of my strong habits 😉 ). Because that is one of the fundamental problems of rules, they stop you being present and enjoying the experience and opportunities of now. That is where they are fundamentally different from habits; a habit is resilient enough to recover from not being performed on occasion or even for a limited period of time. Yet when trying to adopt a new habit making ‘rules’ is an essential part of getting to where you want to be because you are acting consciously. Rules are the shorthand of designing in the environment, process and timings of the necessary activities you want to undertake.
All this made me think about the key things to remember when trying to adopt a habit, to differentiate it from a new set of rules and make sure that the rules are just a temporary means to an end, a framework for getting where you want to be:
- Have a purpose – i.e. a thing that you want that you are motivated about – its unlikely the habit itself is the end-game. I.e. I am working on weight training three times a week so I can be a better sailor, not because I want to lift weights 3 times a week. I may by the time I have the habit have changed my mind about the necessity and joy of lifting weights but it’s not currently my goal.
- Experiment – habit-forming as Duhigg says is an individual process, try a thing, if it doesn’t feel right or get done then try something else, keep the things you are using to form the habit under review. I’ve just realised I have spent years trying and failing to floss at night because my hygienist says that’s when I should, but I’m going to try the morning because I think that might work, and could be a stepping stone.
- Wear lightly – if you don’t do the thing don’t beat yourself up, think about it and try and learn something but move on to try another day or time, maybe go back to 2 and change something.
- Reward and celebrate – acknowledge what you have managed to achieve and the effort and skill that went into making that happen. It will give you a platform to help with future habits. When I wrote my mental list of current self-improvement projects I noted there were at least 3 things that I thought would be on there but actually I now considered them to be habits, but I had not previously acknowledged that I had made that happen.
So, in this spirit I am calling an end to my 30-day challenge. I have learnt a lot of other stuff already with my 9 posts, which I will reflect on elsewhere but on review it’s not the right rule at the right time for me. By focusing on solely my economics learning goal I have over-complicated the rules. I am now aiming to post 3 times a week, and if I make 4 I will be especially pleased for myself. Through to the end of September. And I will post about a wider range of things I am learning about and thinking about. Some posts will be short and shipped quickly but at least 1 a week I will sit down for an hour and focus on thinking through what I want to say – because I don’t think just short shipping is helping with the quality of what I want to say.
nicobobinus 