Practice your skills in different environments to test and fortify them.

During a conversation with a nutrition coaching client, she said “I feel like I am becoming more permissive with my habits and I don’t know how I feel about it”.

She went on to note that although she was feeling more prepared with her new habits, she didn’t feel like they were strong enough yet to be flexible with them. 

Reading this, you can likely appreciate her sentiment. There has no doubt been a time where you have been working on something, but don’t yet feel like it was good enough to share, strong enough to use, or that you were confident enough in the skill/habit. Well, I have good news and bad news.

The bad news…

The bad news is that no habit is ever perfect. There will be unforeseen demands and challenges on any new skills and habits because we can’t control everything in our environment. Knowing that we can’t, should hopefully help us in feeling empowered to get out there and try. Sometimes it will be easy and everything will fall into place (aka nobody will bring carrot cake slices to the office and fill your top draw with M&M’s). Other times there will be pressures and challenges to your skill/habit, and if it doesn’t withstand them then so much the better - we can go back and strengthen them and retool them. This is only bad news if we have mismatched expectations with what it actually takes to change behaviors and build new habits. Thinking that we can control and predict everything is the slippiest of slippy slopes to Slipperyville.

The good news…

The good news is, once we have a habit established and providing our expectations match reality, we can battle test and fortify our habits. Research shows that trying our skills in different situations and environments strengthens them. Engaging in novel activities builds diverse skills and relationships, and gives us practice in handling a wide range of emotions. It's good for creativity, and it's typically beneficial for our mood. In other words, novelty situations build our resilience.

How long? < How many?

So how do you know when you can try out a skill? How long does it take to build a new habit? The question is less “how long” but instead, “how many”.

Habits are iterative and so it is important to have opportunities frequently (I mean as often as possible) to practice the new skill. There are some habits that become automated, like say wearing your seatbelt when you drive. This took practice at first but now it takes up little to know mental real estate for you. You just needed to do it 20, 50, or 100x before you got to that point. You might never know when you are ready to put your habits to the test, but a good rule of thumb might be a week of 2-3x per day practice. This in turn will help you decide what a reasonable habit will be to create in the first place (if you want to read a book per day then this might be too big of a commitment and so aiming for 5 pages 3x per day may be more realistic).

So here is the kicker, we don’t necessarily want all of our habits to be automated (like clicking your seatbelt when driving to work). Why? Well, sticking with this analogy, you won’t always be driving. You will at some point, get into a car with no seatbelt (figuratively speaking) and have to figure it out. In more relevant terms, you might plan ahead to eat something from a restaurant menu and get there and they’re sold out, or even more extremely, the venue gets changed last minute. Knowing how to adjust on the fly and still flex your new habit/skill is part of living your life and building your habits.

It’s not about willpower

Finally, the number of hyper-consistent daily habits someone can keep up is often more a sign of their privilege than their psychological prowess. If you get down on yourself because you think you should keep up more permanent, daily habits, then consider temporary habits (or habits you swap in and out) instead. Habits you perform often enough that they become relatively automatic behavioral sequences can have a lot of value, even if you need to swap them in and out to make room for all your priorities, values, and commitments. Don't over-depend on habit streaks for motivation as relying on these can create fragile habits and be bad for your overall psychological health and decision-making.