The Hardest Bad Habit to Break

Posted on December 20, 2020 by Michal

Plus 5 simple habits which will help you to beat it

If we talk about a single habit the worst habit to get rid of is negative self-talk. Why? Because most of us just accept it as a part of our identity. We don’t even notice it, so we don’t even attempt to get rid of it.

That’s the ‘impossible’ difficulty level. You cannot fight the opponent you don’t even see; you don’t even know he exists.

Negative self-talk is usually at the root of every other bad habit. Being rude, alcoholism, swearing, sleep deprivation, being careless with money, a sedentary lifestyle — all those habits are just symptoms of your faulty thinking processes and behind each of such thinking habits usually lurks the negative self-talk.

You have low self-esteem, so you try to numb it with compulsive shopping or drinking. And where does low self-esteem come from? This vicious little voice in your head whispering:

“I’m stupid. I’m fat. I’m worthless. My father beat me because he didn’t love me; no wonder- I’m downright unlovable. I’m a failure….”

And you don’t even notice those whispers. You act as they were words of the infallible oracle.

Mind Triggers

Do you remember Marty from “Back to the Future?” Whenever someone called him a coward, he felt compelled to prove he wasn’t a coward. Usually, he ended up in big trouble because of that.

It’s the same with our self-talk, only it’s much more subtle because it comes from inside. But the solution to this problem is the same as the solution that worked for Marty: you pause, turn on your conscious thinking processes, examine what’s going on and make a choice how to react. The choice not dictated by your emotions, but by your brain.

“In the space between stimulus (what happens) and how we respond, lies our freedom to choose.
Ultimately, this power to choose is what defines us as human beings. We may have limited choices but we can always choose.
We can choose our thoughts, emotions, moods, words, our actions; we can choose our values and live by principles.
It is the choice of acting or being acted upon.” ― Stephen R. Covey

To do that you need a very elusive skill (well, elusive for modern people) called self-awareness. You need to notice your thoughts sneaking on you to repel them. Self-awareness gives you such power.

Good News

Yes, your thoughts and internal dialog keep you a prisoner. And yes, we are hopeless at noticing and controlling our thought processes.

But you can modify those thoughts by attacking the symptoms. When you break the obvious break habits, the ones that are clearly visible in your life, you become a new person.
When you develop new good habits, it affects who you are. And this new persona has a slightly different thinking pattern, influenced by the change of your circumstances.

You cannot say to yourself “Your fat pig!” if you’ve just lost 10 pounds in the last month. Well, not if you are moderately sane.

However, I deem it an uphill battle. You can liberate yourself from many bad habits if you tackle their common root cause — what is going through your mind.
Instead of taking a detour route, you take the direct one, disarm your internal demons and then you can attack multiple bad habits and create multiple good habits at the same time.

Good Habits in Service of Self-awareness

Develop some self-awareness habits and you will get a fighting chance. You will notice your self-talk, so you will be able to step between the stimulus and reaction.

Here are several good habits very handy for developing self-awareness:

1. Meditation.

It’s a great activity which can bring you benefits practiced even in small doses. Just take three deep breaths and focus your mind on that. That’s the simplest meditation.

Of course, meditation works better in huge doses, but its power lies in the full-out effectiveness of any dose.

2. Journaling.

This activity is also very effective because writing forces you to process your thoughts through the prefrontal cortex – the part of the brain responsible for abstract thinking. Writing translates emotions and images into words — the language of your conscious mind.

3. Walks.

I don’t believe walks are magical in themselves. They just create space for something modern people desperately need — reflection, free-thinking, lack of digital distractions; and some physical activity, which pumps blood through your brain. Put all of those together and you have a chance to notice your internal voice.

4. Asking for feedback.

It’s not for the faint of heart, but it’s about as efficient as journaling. If you are a people person, it may be even more effective because you pay the utmost importance to social cues like tone of voice, facial expressions, and body language.

You can “ask” for feedback even yourself, I do it all the time with my journaling sessions. Make sure though you ask the right questions, focused on solutions (not: “Why I’m so hopeless?!?”).

Asking for feedback works like journaling – to communicate with another human being you need to put together a coherent message and process your emotions and internal images via the prefrontal cortex.

5. Tracking.

Any kind of tracking will do, especially if it involves writing. Your mind is a master liar, it says terrible false things about you, which you believe in.

Tracking is a way to confront your internal voice with reality. How can you be “a fat pig” if you lose 10 pounds and you have daily check-ins from the last month confirming your progress?

Tracking also instills filters in your brain. Track something, anything, and you have much better chances of success than by just trying to wing it.

The single most difficult habit to get rid of is negative self-talk. It’s an invisible enemy most of us don’t even know that exists.

The most efficient way to deal with it, or rather start dealing with it, is increasing your self-awareness.

Why Is It so Easy to Get Addicted to Things that Are Unhealthy but so Difficult to Get Hooked on Healthy Habits

Posted on October 20, 2020 by Michal

Why Is It so Easy to Get Addicted to Things that Are Unhealthy but so Difficult to Get Hooked on Healthy Habits The short answer is: those “unhealthy things” hack directly into our bodily reward system.
Thus, we get an immediate reward (usually: pleasure) from doing them. We crave the pleasure, so the behavior gets reinforced. It easily becomes a habit.

The long answer is more complicated.

The reason why hacking directly into the reward system works so well is that it bypasses the conscious mind. The subconscious mind knows only one tense: now. It is not concerned with the future ramifications of present actions. And it’s quite a primitive creature. Do you feel pleasure? Well, it means this action feels good! Let’s repeat it and get the same pang of pleasure!

No reflections. No pondering of consequences. And your bad habits create on autopilot.

Good Habit Are Easy

Getting hooked on healthy habits is not so difficult. It seems difficult only in comparison with the “zero-effort” way bad habits form.

One of my healthy habits is to eat at least one raw vegetable or fruit a day. It’s very easy. All I need is to remember about the habit (now, after several years it’s my second nature), get a veggie, and munch it.

Yet, it still takes some effort, some investment on the part of my conscious mind. I need to remember. I need to have veggies or fruits at my home. I need to actually perform the action.

Hard Beginnings

It’s even more bothersome at the very beginning when the whole routine is new to you. Even remembering the habit can be an effort. Then, you need actually do it. It’s also beneficial to track it. It’s all the mental effort.

And the reward is not so big. Well, in the beginning, it’s hardly noticeable. And it is certainly not immediate. You switch your diet or exercise for a week before you can see any significant movement on a scale (a few pounds). But you don’t want ‘any!’ You want ‘many!’ And you don’t want them next quarter, but yesterday!

See? Your emotions are working against you. Instant gratification is getting the worst out of you. While developing unhealthy habits you feel nothing but pleasure. While developing healthy habits you often feel disappointment and frustration.

Emotions Are the Problem

BJ Fogg, the behavioral scientist from Stanford University, invented a brilliant addition to the process of developing new habits which make your emotions an ally, not an enemy: you celebrate your habits.

You don’t let your emotions to fend for themselves. You consciously entice the feeling of joy from doing your habit, not from its results. You create your own immediate feedback loop.

How does it look in practice? You do some gesture, or say something nice to yourself like “Nice job!” or “I’m awesome!”

If you have any difficulties imagining what those words or gestures could be, imagine yourself cheering your favorite team in the championships. They just scored! What do you do?! Jump in place? Roar with joy?

This is exactly what you should do to help your healthy habit to develop. Eat a vegetable and roar with joy. Do 10 pushups and jump with excitement. Drink a glass of water and pump your fists in triumph. Prepare a meal and tell yourself: “Well done!”

It takes time to develop good habits. They are worth both time and effort though.

“An immediate reward for lack of discipline is a fun day at the beach. A future reward of discipline is owning the beach.” — Jim Rohn

A future reward for healthy habits is health.

Celebrate each instance of your healthy habit and hack into the emotional reward system of your body.

How to Make Tiny Habits Even Better

Posted on September 20, 2020 by Michal

In June 2020, I ran a couple of Tiny Habits online trainings for my Polish audience. Each time, I designed three new tiny habits for myself. I learned a lot from that experience.
how to make tiny habits even better

BJ Fogg, the inventor of the Tiny Habits method, is a genius. I confirm everything he says about behavior design in his book.

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. – Thomas Edison

It’s easy to be a genius, when you got tens of thousands of people through your trainings, gathered feedback, and put it back into work. Yet, there is still room for improvement in Tiny Habits. I went through two weeks of practicing tiny habits in one month and found numerous improvements that can increase students’ chances for success.

Hence, this post, lessons learned from my Tiny Habits practice.

Here are the tiny habits I practiced during those two weeks:

TH1

#1 After I use a bathroom, I will pop into my children’s rooms.

#2 After I finish my morning journal entry, I will open my journal on the last page and write down at least one person I’m grateful for (and the exact reason I’m grateful).

#3 After I come to my home office with the first morning coffee, I will write a thank you note.

TH2

#1 After I decide to use a bathroom, I will go to the bathroom upstairs (where my kids’ bedrooms are).

#2 After I come to the kitchen, I will clean something.

#3 After I sit down in my chair at the home office, I will rejoice.

1. Celebration.

It’s the core of the whole Tiny Habits method, yet BJ fails to mention it till the very end of the first huge reading assignment. The whole TH method makes little sense without celebration. Chances for success drastically decrease when you don’t celebrate. The celebration should be mentioned at the very beginning and heavily emphasized.

Why? Because it’s counter-intuitive. It should make zero difference, right? There is really nothing to celebrate! The tiny, less-than-30-second action? It’s laughable, not celebration-worthy.

I bet, the above train of thoughts is what goes through the minds of most people. Why? Because we have a negativity bias. We don’t pay attention to what’s going right or well. Especially, if it’s tiny.

Plenty of people are hammered with their own crappy self-talk and it’s a simple subconscious mechanism to keep the status quo. It’s less about the status quo and more about saving your energy. Your subconscious hates doing anything but indulging your senses with pleasure. So, there is friction even against your tiny habits.

However, celebration works like hacking your system for good habits development. You develop bad habits because you get dopamine shots right when you occupy yourself with them.

You bite a Choco bar and you feel a sweet bliss.

You masturbate and you immediately feel a different kind of bliss.

You drink alcohol and you get this joyful buzz inside your head.

You inhale tobacco smoke and you can feel how it soothes your system.

You yell at someone and you feel how the tension inside you dissipates in the eruption of anger.

You tap your mobile screen and you feel a pang of pleasurable anticipation looking forward to the new messages or funny memes.

You do whatever you do, and you are immediately rewarded with a shot of dopamine. Pure bliss! So, you repeat the unfortunate behavior to get this reward again.

The celebration of tiny habits is your way to generate a similar hormonal response in your body as the effect of something you consciously decided to do.

Celebrate, and you immediately will strengthen the habit loop. You will be looking forward to doing your tiny habit next time.

Sometimes, I think humans elevated themselves to the top of the food chain on the planet by becoming the most unpleasant creatures. Looking for dangers is our default mode. Feeling down, dissatisfied and frustrated keep our minds very sensitive to any eventual threats. Feeling good is nice at the moment, but not a preferable survival mechanism.

But we no longer fight for mere survival. We have no basic tools to keep ourselves happy and content. The celebration of your tiny habits is such a tool. It’s your excuse to feel good.

2. Multi-repetition habits are superior.

My TN1#3 habit was a disaster. I couldn’t remember it. I come to my home office with a coffee after my morning ritual. I’m ready to work. Writing a thank you note doesn’t connote in my mind with work. And I had no more chance to recall I should write the note. If I forgot in the morning, the only chance was gone.

3. Context matters.

Gosh, the whole tiny habits experience was enlightening on so many levels. Going through the training twice helped me to realize how important a context is for remembering habits.

Our memory is not a hard drive, it uses associations to store information. If we put a new habit in a similar context, it will make it much easier to remember and do.

Take my TN1#2 habit – writing a person I’m grateful for and the reason. It was also a single-repetition habit, but it went much better. I’ve just journaled, so my mind already was in the writing context.

I use my journal as a gratitude journal, so there an additional connection to gratitude existed.

I’ve told you what an utter disaster TN1#3 was. After the first week, I decided I need to change the anchor for that habit. I moved it right behind jotting down in my journal who am I grateful for.

And it worked like magic. I don’t think I skipped one day since I did that. A huge part of this was the right context. I was writing those people and reasons I’m grateful for them to become more consistent with writing thank you notes. It was a natural consequence to take a sheet of paper and start writing a note right after putting my journal away.

4. Visual cues are indispensable.

Multi-repetition habits are superior, but if you base your new habit on an activity that is basically mindless, it’s hard to remember your new habit. This is where visual cues are indispensable.

Let’s take for example my TN2#2 habit. Our kitchen is connected with a living room and a hallway. There are no doors. I barely notice I’m entering the kitchen. Well, I don’t notice it at all. There is no sign to signal that something changed between one step and another. My habit anchor was too common to trigger the habit.

While the training week, I remembered about it because every day I made an inventory of my tiny habits. But right after I started referring to my habit recipes every day, I lost this habit. Well, not exactly. It became semi-automatic, I think I still cleaned something more often than not.

But I lost any control over the process. I didn’t remember about a habit, so I didn’t celebrate it and didn’t track it. A visual cue in the kitchen would be great to keep this habit in the conscious brain of my brain. A simple thing like a sticky note with one word: “Clean” would be enough.

The same goes for TN2#3. I sit in my chair multiple days a day. This activity is totally mindless. I had no visual cue and only a very distant context (yes, I find joy in my work, most of the time). It was a struggle to remember to rejoice even during the training week, and it was even harder once I stopped reviewing my habit recipes.

Now, over two weeks after the second training I still struggle with remembering the habit. I don’t struggle with the habit itself or its celebration. It feels awesome. I just don’t remember about it.

I lacked the visual cue. I thought about buying a sticker, or a few, of a smiley emoticon, but never got about purchasing them. Then, one day, I noticed a mug on my table. I use it as a visual cue for my habit of drinking a glass of water in the morning.

Also, my morning ritual is a complicated process. I have dozen+ habits and each of them cries for at least a pinch of mindfulness. I need to be aware enough to switch from one activity to another. So, there was this natural level of watchfulness on what I need to do next. Thus, a “mindless” habit of finishing my journaling session could trigger a new habit.

The mug has a sticky figure with a smiley face on it. It’s an ideal visual cue to rejoice.

5. Modification is key.

My rejoicing habit is an ideal example. The original recipe was:

#3 After I sit down in my chair at the home office, I will rejoice.

But I couldn’t connote the act of sitting down in my chair with my new habit.

I thought about a visual cue, a sticker with a smile. And did nothing about it. Then I noticed my mug and decided to put it on my keyboard every time I’ll be standing up from my chair, so when I come back, I’ll have no choice but put it away, so I’ll notice it, so it will remind me about my new habit.

But that was too much fuss. I needed to introduce an entirely new habit of putting my mug on a keyboard.

So, since my mug is on the desk all the time, maybe I should rejoice when I glance at the mug. But it made my awareness too high and the habit too frequent. I would’ve rejoiced 10 times a minute.

Well, maybe I will go back to my original plan and stick a sticker on the chair’s seat. Then, I’ll notice the visual cue only when sitting down.

See? The key is to modify your habit till it fulfills the objective. I want to be more joyful and I need a discipline, which will put me in a state of joy several times a day.

When I defined the original recipe, this objective wasn’t as clear. I only knew I need more joy in my life to be an uplifting presence in the life of my family. It took me a few iterations to get this clarity and get closer to the exact discipline.

When you operate in BJ Fogg’s framework of behavioral design those tiny modifications beget fun, not frustration. There wasn’t a single moment when I was frustrated with this habit. I was constantly focused on the end goal and curious about how I can change what I was doing to reach my objective.

A great side effect of this attitude is that you subconsciously embrace the idea that yes, you certainly can modify your behaviors and achieve the desired end result. The lack of this kind of confidence is at the source of most human miseries on this planet.

My Favorite Tiny Habit

TH1#1 After I use a bathroom, I will pop into my children’s rooms.

Sometimes you will nail it at the first iteration. I spend most of my days downstairs in my home office, alone. My kids spend most of their days in their rooms. We don’t see each other much. The lockdown vividly demonstrated to me how our behavior degraded our family life. What we needed were more interactions.

This tiny habit at least tripled the frequency of our face to face interactions. Nowadays, I’m popping into my kids’ rooms several times a day. Interactions are the fabric of our family life. Now, it can expand and enrich.

Summary

The Tiny Habits method is great. You finish up with new habits, but the process is as valuable as the effect.

Even the most reliable anchor will not help you without the right context, visual cue, or a pinch of awareness. There must be a connotation between the anchor and a new habit.

Multi-repetition habits are superior to once-a-day habits. It’s easier to create a connotation between an anchor and a habit, the habit is developed faster and solidifies faster.

Modification of your tiny habit recipes is an indispensable part of the process. It teaches you that you are in control of your behaviors and creates a can-do attitude.

I hoped I inspired you to take your own Tiny Habits training.

How to Turn Anything into a Habit?

Posted on August 20, 2020 by Michal

Anything? No can do. Not without some additional conditions. For example, if you want to make space trips a habit the only way to do it nowadays is to do those trips in your imagination.

And it applies to zillion other activities. Some things are just flatly impossible (yet) or much harder than others.

But here is how you can do most “things” a habit:

1. Write it down.

Writing things down processes information through the prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain responsible for conscious thinking. If you write something down, it means you will take the thought through the thinking process. If you don’t, you have not such a guarantee.

2. Start small.

BJ Fogg, a brilliant behavior design scientist, recommends to start from something that can be done in 30 seconds, and it is easy. 30 seconds of burpees hardly qualifies here.

Why starting small is so important? Because then you can sustain your new habit. And a habit which can’t be sustained, is not really a habit.

You can maintain a habit of running 100 yards and then scale it up to running marathons. It doesn’t work the other way.

Repeating a new behavior is a matter of motivation and skill (difficulty level). We are absolutely, totally, completely, and utterly hopeless in managing our motivation. It is SO much easier to manage the level of difficulty.

Thus, start small!

3. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

A daily habit is superior to the bi-daily habit by an order of magnitude. Your brain creates the habit loop by scanning the environment and your actions. If you repeat your habit in the same place and time every day, it is easy for your brain to recognize what’s the cue and what’s the routine.

If you do it every second day or once a week, it’s much harder. If you can stuff multiple repetitions into one day, it makes it super easy for your brain to recognize and save the habit.

4. Track.

The easiest way of tracking

is just marking off if you have done or not your habit. It may be more elaborate, for example, I keep a writing log and note down when, what, where, and in which language I wrote, plus, I register the numbers of words I wrote.

However, don’t overdo. Your tracking should be always easier than the habit in itself.

Why tracking works? Again, it engages your conscious mind, so the tumultuous process of creating a new habit is not entirely in hands of your emotional subconscious mind. And it tells the subconscious mind that this activity is actually important. Tracking instills some subconscious routines around the habit which makes it stickier.

The additional benefit of tracking is that it feeds your motivation in an actually manageable way (in opposite to trying peep-talk yourself). You see your progress and it motivates you.

5. Adjust.

In 2006, I started a habit of doing a series of consecutive pushups as my daily workout. This habit morphed more times than I care to count.

I moved it around in my schedule till I discovered the perfect time for it: mornings.

For years, I trained pushups beyond my limit; each time I tried to beat the previous record. Then, around 120 consecutive pushups, the habit was taking too much of my time. So, I started doing harder variations: diamond pushups, leg-elevated pushups, one-hand pushups…

I scaled the habit up. For a few years, I was doing a few series of pushups a day.

I scaled the habit down. I injured my shoulders. When my right shoulder hurt, I did pushups only on the left arm. When both shoulders hurt, I finally resigned from beating records every time.

Nowadays, I do only 12 pushups a day. But I still have a morning workout and I do different bodyweight exercises – squats, sit-ups, lungs, or burpees.

My habit changed multiple times, but it always has been serving the underlying principle: to be more active.

I did pushups to become stronger and healthier. My current morning workout serves the same purpose. In the end, I realized I didn’t start a pushups habit; I started a workout habit.

So, stick to your habit, but don’t be rigid. Life goes on. Circumstances change. Adapt.

Habits, like most successful endeavors in life, come down to two simple rules: get started and keep going.

Points #1 and #1 help you to get started. Points #3-#5 keep you going.

If you break a streak, you can always go back to the first two points and start again. Nobody is invincible.

My friends nicknamed me Mr. Consistency, yet I still broke my writing streak a couple of times in the last seven years. I broke every daily habit (and I have dozens of them) at least several times.

“Fall seven times, stand up eight.” — Japanese Proverb

You don’t need to be perfect. Just stand up after every fall.

Bible Lessons About How to Build Good Habits

Posted on June 20, 2020 by Michal

The Bible is a spiritual scripture, so it’s not the greatest “how-to” manual. It has quite a lot to say about “why,” but it’s quite thin on how to. However, a diligent reader can read between the lines. And I already possessed a wide knowledge of habits, so it was easy for me to pick up some nuggets.

Start Small

Sirach 19: 1b
One who makes light of small matters will gradually sink.

Sirach 11: 32a
A hearthful of glowing coals starts from a single spark.
Continue reading →

How many habits do successful people have?

Posted on May 20, 2020 by Michal

Usually, a lot. Because this is how achieving success looks like:

How many habits do successful people have

(The Slight Edge chart)

Success is a process and you need disciplines, made consistently overtime to get there. You may have just a few massive habits, you can have plenty of minuscule ones or a mix of both.

However, people are wired for small habits. The stories of people who took massive action, persisted and won make great Hollywood blockbusters, but are rare as unicorns. It’s much easier to read books for 10 minutes a day than to read and think 8 hours per day, like Warren Buffet does.

“Success is neither magical nor mysterious. Success is the natural consequence of consistently applying basic fundamentals.” — Jim Rohn

Thus, my guess is: a lot. A dozen? Two dozens? Two hundred?

I study successful people and one thing is sure – the vast majority of them are habit-oriented. I discovered successful people’s several common areas of focus. No matter if they succeeded in sport, business, or spiritual realm, the disciplines they performed were pretty similar.

Here they come:

1. Self-knowledge.

It’s pretty hard to become a better version of yourself if you don’t know what you are improving on. To map out your journey you need a starting point as well as the destination. And because you change all the time, you should study yourself all the time.⁴g⁴0 ,’

Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves–their strengths, their values, and how they best perform. — Peter F. Drucker

The habits that can help you in this area:

a) Meditation

There are zillions of benefits to meditation, including increased focus and finishing at lower blood pressure. Of these, I consider self-awareness the biggest benefit. Usually, you just automatically respond to your subconscious thoughts. Meditation makes you aware of those thinking patterns and allows you to step between the impulse and your response.

b) Journaling

Capturing your self-talk on paper is very enlightening. It’s a powerful tool to clarify your thoughts and to gather plenty of data on yourself.

I journal six days a week and review my entries on Sundays. Sometimes, I write about my emotions and recent events, but always from the perspective of asking why this small trigger released such a strong emotion or what caused me to behave in such a way yesterday.

But most often, I simply research my internal world, journaling about my doubts, dreams, fears, aspirations, etc.

While meditation gives you self-knowledge on an emotional level, journaling gives it on both emotional and intellectual levels.

2. Health.

A successful person rarely doesn’t care about their health. It was more common in the past when people moved more and were eating real food, not the semi-chemical crap we consume now.

But even back then folks like Benjamin Franklin recognized the importance of exercise and diet. Nowadays, health and success are almost synonyms. Of course, you can be sick and still become a better version of yourself. It is simply much fricking harder.

My friend, Rebecca Patrick-Howard has a rare genetic disease and is dying much faster than most of us. Yet, she also moved from depression and being broken into the realm of successful authors

who support their family from writing in a few short years.

I’m a very healthy person, but I don’t sell as many books as she does. I cannot imagine how I could’ve succeeded with my books while battling constant pain and dozens of pesky afflictions connected to her disease.

With today’s health fad we all know what to do to improve our health. You know it too. It’s time to do, instead of contemplating.

a) Exercise

Every single day. We are spiritual creatures in physical bodies. We need to move our bodies to stay in decent shape.

b) Eat Well

There are plenty of different diets. Some of them come from religion or lifestyle choices. But there is one truly healthy rule: eat as many unprocessed foods as possible.

What’s “processed?” You know this as well. An apple was on a tree a few days ago. A pizza was not.

c) Sleep Well

Eight hours a night is a rule of thumb. Sleep needs are individual. Some people need more (for example, Matthew McConaughey sleeps 8.5 hours a night), some people need less (I’m fine with 7-7.5 hours of sleep). Humans in natural conditions sleep 6.5 to 7.25 hours.

Find your sleep needs and get enough sleep.

d) Stay Hydrated

Dehydration is one of the modern world’s curses. Another rule of thumb is to drink 8×8 ounces or 2 liters of water a day. Those needs are individual too. A tiny gal needs less water than a 7-feet ogre.

And don’t drink empty calories (soda). That’s not a path to good health.

3. Networking.

Successful people deliberately network with others.

Your network is your net worth. ― Tim Sanders

Your worth is not only monetary. I think the financial aspect is the least important. Your self-worth is determined to a huge degree by the people you associate with. Successful people understand that and that’s their primary motivation for cultivating their network.

Helpful habits:

a) Thank You Notes

People don’t even take the time to thank others nowadays. You will stand out using this simple technique. Handwritten thank-you notes are more powerful. They’re rare in the digital age.

You can send short audio or video. They’re more powerful than a simple email.

b) Testimonials

Testimonials are like public thank you notes. Write reviews, give testimonials, share them on your social media. The receiver will appreciate it.

c) Collaborate

It always pushes the envelope a bit. When you have to work on common projects your level of interaction increases naturally.

d) Spend Time

This simple networking method always works. You should apply it especially with the people you look up to. The more you can be around your mentors, the faster you will emulate them in your life.

4. Vision.

Successful people are obsessed with their vision, whatever it is. But first, they need to create one. That’s why I started with self-knowledge. It takes some soul searching to discover (Victor Frankl said “detect”) your life mission.

Once they realize what they want to achieve, they keep that vision in front of their mind as often as possible. Average people are often amazed by the drive of successful people. But this drive is not a result of single enlightenment, as we like to imagine. Successful people habitually refer to their vision every day.

Useful habits:

a) Personal Mission Statement

Well, you need to first create one. Once you have it, there are many methods to use it. You can read it, listen to it, repeat in your mind, visualize it, and so on. The point is to refer to it every single day, so your mission is always in your mind’s agenda.

b) Vision Board

Humans think in images. If you have a visual reminder of your purpose, you can look at it multiple times a day.

c) Visualization

You can simply imagine the joy of fulfilling your purpose. Visualizing yourself in the process of getting there would be even better.

5. Education.

The biggest mistake you can make is to think that you are finished learning when you earn your degree. Education is a lifelong process.

Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune. – Jim Rohn

And it is you who have to take charge of your education. Today’s education systems are outdated and expansive. What is more, you need proper learning habits. It’s no longer about appearing in the class 5 days a week. It’s about studying on your own as often and long as needed.

Handy habits:

a) Reading

Read books, blog posts or articles in specialized magazines- whatever makes you more knowledgeable about your subject.

b) Listening

YouTube has countless hours of useful lectures, workshops and speeches. You can convert them into audio and listen to them while doing semi-mindless tasks like driving or washing dishes.

c) Watching

It’s not my cup of tea, but there are people who learn well from watching videos. If that describes you, go for it.

d) Teaching

You retain more if you teach what you’ve just learned because you create more associations with your knowledge. Also, your students may challenge your assumptions and you need to reflect on your knowledge base to come up with convincing arguments.

e) Doing

There is no better learning method than practice. Each time you use your knowledge you gain experience and create more associations. Practice makes you also a better teacher. Internalized knowledge is four times easier to transfer than dry theory.

6. Habits.

Successful people recognize the utmost importance of habits in their lives. They don’t let their habits be a conglomerate of the social and physical environment. They consciously work on avoiding bad habits and developing good ones.

Your beliefs become your thoughts,
Your thoughts become your words,
Your words become your actions,
Your actions become your habits,
Your habits become your values,
Your values become your destiny.
― Mahatma Gandhi

I don’t have useful habits here for you. My point is, you need to analyze, develop and maintain your habits. Self-knowledge and education are very handy for accomplishing that goal.

I have two great resources for you:

a) Tiny Habits course

which is free, short, and easy. It also teaches the basics of habits development by implementation and experience, not pure theory.

b) My blog post series Infallible Framework for Habit Development

explains in great detail all the necessary elements to develop lasting habits. When I stuck to this framework, I always succeeded. When I didn’t follow it, the output wasn’t as good.

7 Best Free Resources for Developing Habits

Posted on April 20, 2020 by Michal

While answering hundreds and hundreds of questions about habits on Quora I found myself referring to some free resources for developing good habits over and over again.

They are free. They are effective. They are helpful. So, here I share them with you.

1. Tiny Habits course

It’s free. It’s jam-packed with valuable knowledge about habits. It gives you the exact framework to develop habits.

It’s ultra-short. It takes a week, but it only consumes about one hour of your time overall.

And here comes the best: After this one week, you end up with three brain new good habits.

Ignore the rest of the resources and you’ll be good. Tiny Habits is 80% of the Pareto rule when it comes to those resources.

2. How habits work by Charles Duhigg

Charles is the author of the great book, “The Power of Habit.”

Yes, as the title says, there is some theory about habits in that article. But I refer people to it mainly to learn how to actually rebuild habits you are not satisfied with, aka bad habits.

It’s the best resource on the Internet, meaning the best in the whole world, about reprogramming your habits.

3. Coach.me

7 Best Free Resources for Developing Good Habits This platform was built as a habit tracking app called Lift. Later, they pivoted into coaching.

This application has absolutely everything you need to successfully develop new habits: the tracking system, the social aspect, and even the educational element – you can ask coaches and other users, for free, about specific habits.

I’ve been using it for years and I recommend it wholeheartedly.

4. BJ Fogg Behavioral Model

This model is a state-of-the-art piece of scientific research. BJ spent over two decades studying how to change people’s behaviors. His conclusions are to the point and very practical.

They describe the reality on the macro level, and at the same time, on the level of a single repetition of your habit. This model is the basis of his Tiny Habits concept.

I found it both convincing and enlightening. Like Duhigg’s piece about reprogramming habits, it’s the obligatory lecture for anyone even remotely interested in the subject of habit development.

5. The Four Tendencies Test

Short, funny, and enlightening test that will tell you how you approach habits in your life. Are you a Questioner or a Rebel? Find out and learn what tactics you can employ to make your habits stickier and struggle less.

6. James Clear’s blog

James Clear is the author of the book Atomic Habits. His blog is absolutely amazing when it comes to long articles packed with scientific research.
For example, I refer people all the time to his guides on sleep or creativity.

7. Zenhabits blog

I followed this blog at the very beginning of my transformation. This is where I got my Uncopyright idea from.

It’s created by Leo Babauta. This guy is a true practitioner. The reading experience is unparalleled. Leo removed all the distractions from his blog.

You think “only seven?” Well, they can keep you busy for weeks. And they are no fluff at all! Only seven, but they are the best free resources for developing habits available on the Internet.

3 Roles of a Friend in Good Habits Formation

Posted on March 20, 2020 by Michal

I can see at least three ways friends can support forming good habits right away. Probably, there are more.

1. Role Model.

Human beings are mimicking machines. We mimic without thinking, unconsciously. So, if your friend has some good habits you are in a much better position to adopt similar habits.

This is the one real hack when it comes to developing habits: spend more time with people who already have those habits. You will absorb their behaviors in a background mode, no conscious effort required. Putting some purposefulness into following your friends’ habits will accelerate the process, but it’s not necessary.

“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” — Jim Rohn

This “function” of friends with regard to developing habits is highly overlooked. We understand that others can teach us something, give us tips, observe us and correct; but we don’t even think we are becoming like them simply by being around them.

2. Encourager.

Most people are not naturally good at celebrating their own wins. BJ Fogg, the expert in behavior design from Stanford University, considers a celebration of your habits the most important aspect of swift and solid progress:

“I would train you in celebrations before teaching you about the Fogg Behavior Model, or the power of simplicity, or Anchors, or recipes for Tiny Habits.”

In other words, he would train you in celebrations before anything else. That’s how crucial it is.

So, the next best thing a friend can do for you to form good habits is reminding you about the celebration.

“Have you done your exercises today? Man, that’s awesome! I’m so proud of you!”

A good friend should be looking for your right behaviors like a hawk and catch you “doing good.”

3. Accountability Partner.

I personally trained over 100 people in developing habits. About 80 of them barely needed my advice. They just needed someone to watch them and keep them on track.

There are different statistics about this phenomenon, but one thing is sure- you have MUCH higher chances for success if you report your progress to an accountability partner (the range was easy from 20% to 80% more chance for success).

Just the awareness that you need to tell somebody if you did your new habit or not makes you many times more likely to follow with the new behavior.

And this is what forming habits is about – consistent repetition.

Be a good friend. Instill habits that you would like your friends to follow. Encourage them like crazy. Keep your friends accountable for their progress.

10 Simple Habits to Greatly Improve Your Social Skills

Posted on February 20, 2020 by Michal

10 Simple Habits to Greatly Improve Your Social Skills Those habits are simple indeed. However, they elevated my social skills from the level below zero to a point where people who meet me for the first time think I’m a social butterfly.

I consider their biggest benefit that for half of them you actually don’t need cooperation from others at all. You can practice those habits in the security of your own mind.

1. Notice Other People

Start recognizing the people around you. Look at them and think about them.

What things do you have in common? What things in them spark your interest?

2. Observe Other People

Stop digging lonely in your own mind. Look at the people around and think about them.

How do they behave? How they are behaving toward you? If you had to praise a specific man or woman, what would you say?

3. Mind Games

Once you notice people around you and think about them in the positive light, imagine striking conversations with them.

Visualize how you approach them, say “Hi”, start a conversation and tell them about that nice good thing about them you’ve noticed.

4. Eye Contact

The first step of the conversation is to make eye contact. Stop avoiding other person’s eyesight. If you don’t notice them you won’t talk to them. After breaking eye contact give this person a minute of reflection.

What things do you have in common? What things in them spark your interest? If you had to praise him/her, what would you say?

5. Smile

The next important factor in your becoming sociable is using your smile. Often we are so locked in our fears and insecurities regarding other people that we don’t notice they have their own difficulties. We all are so isolated in our fast-paced society and the simple act of smiling can knock down the barriers between us.

So, make eye contact and smile. You will be surprised by the mix of responses you will get. Some people will flinch, wince or recoil: “A stranger smiling at me? This is so unexpected!”

Many people will look away to break the eye contact, plainly feeling uncomfortable. Many will look at you incredulously: “Is it real? Is this person smiling at me?” They will take a quick peep around looking for the person who you are really smiling at, then get back to you, realizing that they are the receivers of your smile.

And I love best those handful that smile back at me. There will be such people in your case too.

6. Say “Hi”

Or “How do you do” or whatever people in your culture say to each other when they start a conversation.

If you made eye contact and smiled at them and they smiled back at you, it’s a no-brainer.

That’s it. You don’t need to do anything else. No obligation to discuss life and death matters. A simple “Hi” is enough.

7. Praise

Everybody likes to be praised. I’ve never met with the reaction of rejection when I praised a stranger. No one has ever told me “Get lost!” when I praised him.

The range of reactions is wide and mixed, but it always stays in the positive spectrum.

So praise. Look at the stranger and think what you could praise — an image; their clothes; a cool tattoo; maybe certain behavior?

Starting a conversation with praise is rarely as rewarding as talking about the purpose of life, but it’s an order of magnitude easier.

8. Ask about Them.

This is powerful. Everybody loves to talk about themselves. And people think you are so smart and likable when you make it all about them!

I have some contacts with really high-profile people, millionaires and the like. Those folks have a truly magical ability to make me talk.

A hack to make it work: be really curious about them. Reflect that in your language: “That’s fascinating! Can you tell me more?”

Listen with Your Body.

Master a few simple habits which signalize you are listening to the other person. Lean into them. Look at them, preferably right at their face. Make small head movements indicating that you are trying to listen to them with all your might.

Listen

This is huge. You may have a habit of asking deep insightful questions, but if you don’t listen to the responses of others, you could’ve as well ask no questions.

It’s a common struggle. We all love to talk, especially about ourselves. Especially when you ask a question, shut up and listen carefully to what they say. You may add another habit on top of that – ask another question at the end of their utterance:

Is that all?
What do you mean by that?

or simply repeat their last words with a questioning tone encouraging them to continue.

Some helpful tips to cultivate this habit:
-make sure you always speak less than the other person,
-say fewer words than the other person,
-shut up; use grunts and gestures to communicate;
-use twice as many questions in your conversations than you use declarative statements
-never give your opinion in a conversation unless you were specifically asked for it

There are more social habits, but the above ones cover the basics. Master the basics and other skills will be easier to practice.

What Kind of Habits Can You Develop in 21 Days?

Posted on June 20, 2019 by Michal

The only study I ever found on the time of developing a habit concluded it takes from 18 to 254 days and in 50% of cases, it’s longer than 66 days. So, developing a habit in 21 days is not an easy feat.

What kind of habits can you develop in 21 days?

Repetitions

The research I mentioned was about daily habits. Participants were performing their habits once a day. This is the first way to increase your chances – increase the number of repetitions. Continue reading →