A lot of awareness is being created about the importance of all the small actions we take, which later forms the bigger ones that make the significant changes we see.
BJ Fogg, who has spent over 20 years in this field, has taken time and effort to explain, through – “Tiny Habits”, the reason we should focus more on how we do the little things.
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Creating positive habits is the place to start
When you create tiny positive habits, you lay the path for success. Your daily activities should be in sync with what you want from life, if not, there will be a huge disconnection between what you want and what you do – which is a sure path to being unsuccessful.
If you have been trying to fix your habits but haven’t seen positive results, you may start feeling like it’s impossible and this could kill your motivation. Don’t think that way, when you use the correct approach, positive habits will be easy to imbibe.
You need to use the right methods
Building a new habit looks hard because we are used to the wrong approaches that depend mainly on guesswork, willpower, or accountability measures. The right method involves steps that are in line with how human psychology works, so if that is not what you have been following, you now understand why it has been hard for you to fix your habits.
Don’t put too much pressure on yourself to have only good habits immediately. No one is perfect and there may be one or two bad habits that will take longer to eliminate – this is normal. Just aim to improve yourself by learning more good habits that will overshadow the fewer bad ones.
Make big one-time changes through tiny habits
When you understand how tiny habits work, and why it is so effective, you will find it easy to make big one-time changes. Those stubborn habits you have been trying so hard to drop will be gone in no time as long as you employ the right approach.
Take any behaviour you want and make it tiny by breaking it down into smaller ones, then look for the places that those smaller habits fit into your life. After you do this, you will see a clear path to victory. Now, all you need to do is to nurture those tiny habits into the places they belong in your lifestyle – this is how you will successfully make those big changes you really need in your life. It is always advisable to start small.
The way you feel also matters
Don’t write this part off. You could easily get choked up by the things going on in your life and start blaming yourself for not being able to quickly drop your bad habits – this will not help at all. In fact, it will draw you back.
When you are feeling good, it will be easier for you to start and continue the process involved in changing your habits. If you feel bad, it will not be so easy for you and you will constantly lose motivation, which will result in poor results and make you feel worse than you did before. So be careful, don’t get pessimistic no matter what!
A behaviour happens when motivation, ability and prompt (the three elements of MAP) come together at the same moment. Motivation is your desire to do the right thing, ability is your capacity to carry it out, and prompt is your cue to get into action.
Even on a normal day, do you notice that you are more likely to do something when you are in a good mood? That is because the human mind does things better when people are in a good mood. So take care of your feelings and protect yourself from whatever is going to drain you. When you feel good, you will make healthy changes to your habits.
Understanding the elements of MAP (motivation, ability, and prompt)
No habit can change without a prompt. If you don’t have a prompt, your high level of motivation and ability will not matter. Despite being considered as the simplest of the MAP elements, prompt determines if an action is taken or not, so it is very powerful.
As for motivation and ability, they are continuous variables. There is a motivation and an ability to do something, the degree is what fluctuates. But prompt is either there or not, which is why you are either using what you have to take an action or wasting all you have by not taking any action.
The way you can hack this to make yourself better is by manipulating prompts. You can disrupt a bad habit by removing the prompt. This may not be easy, but it is the most effective start to dropping bad habits.
Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything
by BJ Fogg
