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In last week’s episode, I gave you some tips for boosting your willpower so you could reach your meditation goal, or any self-improvement goal for that matter. Today, I want to describe a method that takes willpower out of the equation altogether.

Willpower ebbs and flows and sometimes it’s just not strong enough to sustain your self-improvement efforts. Habits, on the other hand, are steady and automatic. Once established, they require no effort, and no willpower. The dictionary definition of “habit” is: A regular tendency or practice, especially one that’s hard to give up.

And, isn’t that exactly what you’re looking for? You want your goal-directed activity to be hard to give up so that you don’t have to struggle to make yourself perform it. So, let me show you how to create a helpful habit.

 

Habits have three components:

The cue - the thing that triggers the habitual action

The behaviour - the action that you want to perform habitually

The reward - the benefit of performing the behaviour

 

For example, let’s take my morning tooth brushing habit:

Cue: I get out of bed

Behaviour: I brush my teeth

Reward: My mouth feels fresh and clean, and that feels pleasant

 

To create a robust new habit, a meditation habit for example, you need to structure each of the three components carefully. Here’s how you do it.

Select the right cue

A cue is a strong impetus to perform the behaviour. It leads directly to the behaviour. If you want a behaviour to become routine, you need to set up a strong, reliable cue.

And, what’s stronger and more reliable than a habit? Although your cue could be something like an alarm, using a habit as a cue is much more effective. For example, let’s say you walk your dog every morning. You do it every day, without thinking about it, without struggle. It’s a habit. You might choose to chain your new meditation habit to your walk. Immediately after you return home from walking your dog, you meditate.

Effectively, you’re harnessing the power of one habit to create another.

 

Peaceful Moment of the Week

 

Select the right behaviour

Take care to choose the right behaviour. You want to succeed in performing the behaviour every time, because when you succeed, you get a reward and the reward is what strengthens the habit. If you fail in performing the behaviour, you get no reward and you’ll likely weaken the habit.

To begin with, select a behaviour that is so easy to perform that you cannot fail. For example, if you’re trying to establish a workout routine, you might choose to do one squat. Yes, just one. Of course, one squat per day won’t get you physically fit, but it’s where you need to begin to establish the habit. Once the habit is firmly in place, you can ramp up your performance, adding more and more exercise.

This might be the most difficult advice to follow, because it may feel like a simple behaviour isn’t worth doing, and because you might be anxious to achieve results. But, it’s the best strategy.

If you start by choosing a complex or challenging behaviour, there’s a good chance your mind will resist doing it. The human brain is evolutionarily primed to avoid exerting effort, so resistance is likely. If you give in to resistance, you’ll fail to perform the behaviour, and you’ll weaken the habit. Willpower may see you through for a while, but remember, willpower isn’t reliable. It’s highly likely that you’ll quit at some point and fail to sustain the habit.