Adherence Part 5; Habit
6 part Adherence series to help busy guys make lasting physique, health, and fitness changes.
After a decade experience, guys often expect things to become a habit overnight and then get pissed off when things are still a challenge 5 days in.
Inspiration
Motivation
Intention
Discipline
Habit
Passion
5. Habit
It is important to understand that habits are iterative and formed by practice not simply time.
When we have powerful internal motivation and a clear plan, and discipline helping us take action even when we don’t feel inspired to, we get to the building of habits.
The question “how long does it take to build a habit” is the wrong question. Instead, we should ask “how many does it take to build a habit”. Habits are iterative and formed by practice not simply time. If you take action 1x per month, chances are you won’t build great proficiency in that area. If you can practice that action 1x per day for example, then chances are you are going to become proficient at it much faster.
Habits still take conscious effort to build and solidify, but once you’ve done a thing enough times, you become more efficient at it and it costs you less.
If you’ve got kids, think about how you potty trained your child(ren). It took weeks and months to get this down. Iteration after iteration, dirty diaper after dirty diaper, but eventually (hopefully enough for you at least) they made going to the bathroom a habit and voila.
Once you have established a habit, you can add the next layer of practice and start building in new more challenging actions.
Start simple (not easy) and make the opportunities to practice as frequent as possible throughout each day (including the weekend).
Much like discipline, habit makes taking action more consistent, allowing you to look back on things that you previously found difficult, adding to the body of evidence that you are the kind of guy that is invested in this goal and who can do difficult things.
That's a great feeling!
