Brian talks about the 4 steps in every habit from James Clear's book, Atomic Habits.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iz7YnCOhsLc

Transcription

Four steps in every habit.

Hi, I'm Brian Pombo. Welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

Today I wanted to talk again about a chapter of this book or section out of this book, Atomic Habits by James Clear.

This is the fourth such video and podcasts that we've been doing regarding this topic.

It's a really interesting idea, because this is that these first few are just laying the foundation of what his whole concept is about. And it's not something that he created. In fact, I first heard about this habit loop from a Charles Duhigg book, The Power of Habit.

It's a very interesting book very well written with a lot of great stories. And this one is, is a little more instructive.

This Atomic Habits is a little more instructive. And this is a great chapter on that, because it lays the foundation for the rest of the book.

So the rest of the book, he goes through each of these four steps, and how it relates to both good habits and bad habits.

So this is really good stuff.

Let me see here. Let me dig into some of my favorite quotes here. I really like this one, because I think it was one of the things that really pushed me away from anything having to do with even the concept of habits.

And it was this, he said, habits do not restrict freedom, they create it. In fact, the people who don't have their habits handled are often the ones with the least amount of freedom.

That's a strange paradox.

If you think about it, you know, because if it's something that you're stuck doing, you think of a bad habit. If it's something you're stuck doing, that's a lack of freedom. But what if it's a good habit?

What if it's something that provides you something good in the long run, but it's not necessarily super enjoyable while you're doing the brushing, you know, you're brushing your teeth, you take anything that you consider a good habit, it doesn't necessarily have a huge boost of anything right up front which is what makes it useful.

Okay, that and that's, it's the reason why we've given the ability to have habits in our brain, no doubt that this, this is a useful function of the human condition.

And so it's really coming to that coming to terms with that idea myself, that led me to dig deeper and deeper into habits and how they can be useful how we can use them to our benefit, while at the same time being able to drop habits that we don't like that aren't useful.

They are useful to some extent, obviously, they provide something otherwise we wouldn't be doing them is just oftentimes bad.

We call them bad habits because they're bringing something worse in that we're getting more bad out of them than good out of them.

We go on here, there's a whole lot that I went through that I'm not going to cover here, but the main thing I want you to look at is the habit loop.

The habit loop starts with a cue, and then goes to craving and then a response, and then a reward.

Then the idea is that the cue, the first step, ends up getting connected with the last step. When you get the cue, when you get the thing that is that lead you into the process of the habit, you're relating it to the reward at where it's instantaneous, so you don't even think about it.