It is never enough to know what to do. You must also do what you know. The thinking and behaviors that you have today mostly developed as responses to solving problems that you encountered in your past. Most of that problem solving revolved around moving out of perceived pain as soon as possible into something more pleasurable, or at least not painful. Such behaviors have allowed you to survive and get along in the world, but very often, those behaviors don’t properly solve the underlying problem. Those behaviors are responses to symptoms of a problem. In order to move ahead in life and to overcome the root causes the create the symptoms and spark off our responses, we often have to think, behave and respond differently to how we now behave. We have to create new habits. Creating new habits is not so very hard, only it’s much easier not to create new habits, so we must prepare ourselves for this task, if we want to succeed more easily.

Your current thinking, interpretation of problems and your habitual responses have created your comfort zone. To get improved results in life, you have to transform yourself and that means going outside of your existing comfort zone. That has negative connotations, so instead, let’s think of it as expanding your comfort zone to encompass new levels of ability.

Very often, the new habit that we want to create does not require a huge step change in ability. The chances are that the behavior required is marginally possible but so far it has not been fully established within our overall sphere of competencies. The required habit has not been established because it still contains some problem solving that has not been properly resolved. Until we solve those problems, whether they be attitudinal or practical, then it will prove difficult to establish a habit.

Before we take a look at those problem solving aspects, let’s take a look a more detailed look at habits and why old ones seem difficult to overcome and replace with new ones. As mentioned above, your current responses sufficed as stop gap measures to deal with immediate difficulties, but if you keep coming up against the same problem time and time again, then your habitual response is ineffective, because it hasn’t solved the underlying root cause. However, unless we work on the root cause and develop habitual responses to deal with such a stimulus, then we will keep returning to our old habits, because they get us out of immediate difficulty. Our emotions drive us to seek relief from pain, because pain infers that some aspect of our survival might be at threat, and hence we seek instant gratification.

We can consider these ingrained responses as a kind of gravity. They keep pulling us back to old patterns of behavior. To establish a new habit, we have to achieve escape velocity to reach a new orbit. For a rocket, breaking through Earth’s gravitational pull requires huge amounts of energy in the initial few minutes. To overcome ingrained habits, we need to consider things in a similar fashion. Our willpower can be the spark that ignites the rocket, but it doesn’t have sufficient power to carry us into orbit. We need plenty of fuel in the form of dedicated action, and we can make the job easier by reducing the size of the payload. That payload is the problem-solving and preparation involved to make the change.

When considering adopting a new habit, it is first necessary to think about what has stopped you previously. Normally, there are points of resistance that thwart you.

1. Imagine the new habit that you want to adopt - how would you have to think and behave to make it a reality? What new knowledge, process or resources would you need to have to carry out this new resource consistently, over and over again?
2. List those items and then set about doing the necessary research, learning and preparation necessary to allow you to carry out the new habit.
3. Prepare your mind for carrying out the new habit. Set small desires for the new habit that are easy to fulfill. Write down the benefits that you will get from adopting the new habit. Think through the new process, especially where it will be difficult and what you have in place to make it easy.
4. Set your quitting parameters. This a tip from a marathon runner, who says that in the moment of some temporary frustration or annoyance you can easily feel mentally weak and want to quit. By identifying this likelihood, you can prepare your mind for it and set some standards and guidelines that will take you through the momentary resistance and that will keep you persisting. Of course, if it is really too difficult, then quitting is sometimes acceptable, just try to avoid make such decisions on a momentary whim.
5. Accept that difficulty and frustration will occur. In the beginning, it will prove slow and cumbersome to try out the new habit. You may have to do some further problem solving along the way as you experiment and make the habit smooth and easy to do.
6. Carry out new habits using a 30-day introduction program.

The 30-day program is recommended by many (including Steve Pavlina). This period of time allows you to go through three common phases that occur when adopting a new habit.

1. The first 10-days: This is where you have to overcome the most gravity. It’s where you need maximum willpower. You will encounter resistance and defiance as you seek to transform yourself. Through this process you end up adopting a new aspect to your identity and many people are resistant to this. Actually, you want the new behavior, but it’s different and it requires change. You need to keep up your desire to have the improved behavior and to go through this short-term, but high level of resistance. Since your willpower will not last for long, you need all of that prior preparation to reduce the load and make achieving escape velocity much easier.
2. The second10-days: Here there is less defiance but there is still active resistance, as you still need to condition the new way of responding. The old way of responding was easier and it probably delivered more instant gratification than the new way. However, if you want the long-term benefits that come from adopting the new behavior, then keep reminding yourself of this. Keep returning to the points 1 to 5 above to keep yourself on track.
3. The final 10-days: This is the period during which you become acclimatized to the new habit. The defiance and resistance has mostly faded away and is replaced by acceptance of the new habit. The habit becomes increasingly integrated and conditioned into your thinking, so that you miss it if you don’t do it.

You can make the adoption of new habits much more successful, if you build in flexibility into the process. Allow yourself some margin for slipping up. Set yourself an 80% rate of fulfillment, e.g. 5 or 6 days out of 7, rather than every day without fail. There’s no sense in beating yourself up for not following through like a robot each and every time. Perfection with implementing habits is not important. What we want to do is to create a trend of behavior that over time, and with continuous incremental advances, has a major and positive impact on the results that you create in your life.

If you fall off the wagon, then just accept that and quickly forgive yourself. Review your preparation of mind, method and resources and get back on track as soon as possible. If it’s still difficult to keep up a habit, then reduce your expectations and complexity, or else put more thought into the problem solving necessary to support the new habit and to make it easy to carry out.

Developing new habits is one of most important action skills that you need to develop. Without it, you are likely to just keep on reading about solutions and answers, but never implementing them. That will keep you where you are and you will find it difficult to get the improved results that you want in life. Creating new habits has become a major focus for me, so that I can regularly and properly implement all of the good things that I discover and can use to improve my life. How about you? What new habits do you want to adopt that maybe you are struggling with? What tips do you have to share on your own habit forming techniques?

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