In my practice, I’ve seen what people struggled with the most and what enabled them the most.

Creating new habits doesn’t have to be a slog. Here are five easy tips to eliminate the struggle from developing good habits:

1. Make It Tiny.

By far, the #1 struggle with developing habits comes from inflated ambition. Our minds are bombarded by media with incredible transformation stories, so we want impressive results and we want them NOW. Or, better yet, yesterday. Thus, when people develop a new habit, the #1 mistake is trying to do too much too quickly.

You try to lose weight by pumping iron for 3 hours a day.

You try to write a book by writing for 5 hours a day.

You try to learn a new language by learning 199 new words every day.

It is too much. Your subconscious will quickly rebel against such overcommitment.

The solution? Make your habit tiny; a tiny habit is an activity that:

-you do at least once a day,
-takes you less than 30 seconds,
-requires little effort.

Additional hack: design a tiny habit, which you can do multiple times a day, preferably dozens of times a day. Developing a habit takes 66 repetitions on average. With a tiny habit, you can compress this process into a few days.

Take the free Tiny Habits course. It starts every Monday, takes less than an hour for the whole week, and in the process you will develop three new habits.

2. Celebrate Your Habit.

Bad habits easily stick to us because they go hand in hand with our body’s reward system. You eat something sweet, and dopamine hits immediately. You yell at others, and you immediately feel powerful. You gulp alcohol, and you feel the boost of self-confidence in mere seconds.

However, good habits rarely can tap into this reward system so easily, if at all. For example, in the moment, working out or fasting is more of a punishment for the body, than a reward. Even purely intellectual habits, like reading or writing are, at best, neutral for our bodies.

Thus, in order to connote your good habit with a reward, you need to celebrate. That’s the fastest way to activate your body’s reward system, and the easiest way to make your habit pleasurable.

Here is what BJ Fogg, the inventor of the Tiny Habits framework, recommends for celebration:

3. Get Educated about Habits.

Knowing the habit science is not obligatory – I developed dozens of habits being clueless about it – but helpful. The Tiny Habits course gives an excellent pill of habit knowledge: small, but practical and digestible. I can also recommend my blog post series about habits:

Infallible Framework for Habit Development: Endpoint

Get to know what a habit loop is, how to pick the right triggers, etc.

4. Get Someone Onboard.

We are VERY social animals. Don’t try to develop your habit by your own power. Leverage the help from others.

Ideally, muster some support from someone who “has been there and done that” – had similar struggles, but overcame them and now has a habit you want to develop. Human beings learn by mimicry, this is how kids learn life. Just being around people who possess your desirable habit will “magically” rub off the habit from them.

But any support is much better than no support. Declare your goal. Talk with a friend. Find an accountability partner who wants to develop the same habit. Join a group focused on this habit. Get a coach.

Just involve minimum one other person in your personal quest.

5. Become Your Habit.

Make it part of your identity: “I am a person who…”

If that rings false in your ears, you can always use the variation: “I am becoming a person who…”

When I got the idea to become a writer, I put in my personal mission statement a sentence, “I’m becoming a writer.” I couldn’t truthfully tell myself I was a writer, so I used this trick.

Back then, I had been so clueless that I didn’t even know what it meant to be a writer. It took me the whole month to figure out that writers write! Yet, repeating that sentence from my personal mission statement put my mind on the right track. Nowadays, part of my personal identity is “I am a person who writes every day.”

Identity is a powerful motivator. No excuse can get in its way. If you are clueless, you will figure it out. If you are exhausted, you will persevere. If you are discouraged, you will do your habit anyway.

Because this is who you are.

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Start small.

Be mindful about generating a dopamine boost for your new habit.

Get familiar with the habit science.

Get some social support.

Adopt this new habit as a part of your identity.

This is how you make developing a good habit less of a struggle and more of an adventure.

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Originally Published in Quora.

9. Habits.

It is not enough to just know all the above principles. You need to implement them to reap their benefits.

So what good is it to know you need to take care of your nutrition, sleep schedule, and exercises, if you do nothing about it?

So what, if you intellectually get that you need to pause and stop thinking to generate new ideas, if you are constantly busy?

So what good is it to have your assistant put all your meetings in your Google calendar if you never actually check your calendar?

So what, if you have a great vision, mission and values for your business, if you never tell anybody (including your own team!) what they are?

And you can – and should! – build relevant habits for every universal principle that works. Here are some examples:

-exercise for 15 minutes a day
-meditate for 5 minutes a day
-reach out to at least one person a day to talk about your business (accountability partnership is the best example)
-consult your calendar multiple times a day, make it a central hub of your schedule
-on a daily basis, track your incoming and outgoing money
-prospect for new clients every day
-every time you are doing something for the second time in your business, record it and create a standard operating procedure out of it (if you do it for the 10th time it makes 10 times more sense to create the SOP)
-go over your business’ core values in a weekly team meeting

Of course, there are zillions of other possible habits relevant to your business. The point is that even the most brilliant business principle – which works! – will not work without putting it into action.

And there is no better way to implement something than by making a habit of it. Sooner than later, you will develop neural loops in your brain that will make putting those principles into action a no-brainer.
And I mean it literally; the subconscious routines will take care of the biggest chunks of those tasks, and the investment of your conscious attention will be minimal.

Do you know the dictionary definition of a habit?
a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up.

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Relevant habits will solidify the universal principles that work in your business. Which means your business will work. In fact, it will thrive.

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Nine Universal Business Principles
Principle #1 Separating Successful Entrepreneurs from Those Who Went out of Business
Principle #2 Separating Successful Entrepreneurs from Those Who Went out of Business
Principles #3&4 Separating Successful Entrepreneurs from Those Who Went out of Business
Principles #5&6 Separating Successful Entrepreneurs from Those Who Went out of Business
Principles #7&8 Separating Successful Entrepreneurs from Those Who Went out of Business
Principle #9 Separating Successful Entrepreneurs from Those Who Went out of Business

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Originally published in Medium.

Nope, creating habits doesn’t get harder as you get older… everything gets harder.

I heard on The Brian Buffini Show a story of a golfer who won whatever golfers win (golf is totally NOT my thing) after 50.

This golfer said he realized he just needed to put more effort than previously into his practices when he got older. He still could be an excellent golfer; he just needed to try harder.

Good News

But it only goes as far as your physical limitations. You try to exercise more and your body is more prone to injury. You are trying to develop a new habit, but your memory cheats you and you forget about starting the habit in the first place.
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What kind of obnoxious question is this? Of course, I have no bad habits! I’m perfect!

Gotcha! 😀

There are no perfect people on this world. Our habits make us who we are, so lack of perfection suggests at least some bad habits.

My Bad Habits

I don’t go to sleep early enough to have a truly productive morning.

I don’t praise my children often enough (read: I almost never praise them).

I binge-eat on sweets all too often.

Stop! Enough of this embarrassing list! I hope you got the point. I have “some” bad habits.
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Photo by Barbara Olsen from Pexels

The key to maintaining your habits for a long time is an intention to do so. If you aren’t mindful about your habits, sooner or later, you will slip. Then, you will either go back on track, or you will just let it slip further. If you don’t care about your habits, not continuing them doesn’t seem to be a big deal, right?

So, how to care about your habits?

You need to realize their utmost importance. You cannot be indifferent about your habits.

Maybe the message from James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, will do that for you:
How long does it take to build a habit?
21 days? 30 days? 66 days?
The honest answer is: forever. Because once you stop doing it, it is no longer a habit.
A habit is a lifestyle to be lived, not a finish line to be crossed. Make small, sustainable changes you can stick with.
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Photo by Tara Winstead from Pexels

Recently, I had an unproductive week and I spent a way too much time on YouTube watching “Pitch Meetings” – a hilarious series of videos where a YouTuber pretends to be a screenwriter and a producer at the same time and is “pitching” existing movie ideas revealing weaknesses in plots, acting, and everything between.

“Way too much” in my case is about two hours that week. But it was still more than my second weakness in order – news websites.

I confessed my struggles to my mastermind buddies, and we talked it over for some time.

During our conversation, I realized I didn’t have such problems with other platforms and media I have been using on a daily basis. I’m at Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium and Quora every day, yet I didn’t waste my time there. How come?

Intentionality

After a moment of reflection, I discovered the crucial element which makes a big difference in using or wasting my time at online platforms: intentionality.
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Deconstructing a few success stories from my life.

Image by Mohamed Nuzrath from Pixabay

The difficulty level depends on the habit very much. I’ll give you a few examples.

1. Gaming Habit

I played computer games since I was exposed to the computer at the age of 12. I played my whole adult life till I was 33 years old. It was my escape mechanism. I loved strategy games. I could engage my whole brain into the gameplay and feel a pang of dopamine when I won, of course.

It was a bad habit, no doubt about that. I didn’t play a lot by modern standards, just 24–48 hours a month. But I stole those hours from my life — my sleep, my family, my job. I even played during work hours sometimes.

How hard it was to kick my gaming habit? Pretty easy. I decided to change my life. I already knew this habit doesn’t contribute any good to my life.

I had been tracking my time for two weeks, every single minute. I played only for 4.5 hours during those two weeks. Just the awareness that I would’ve needed to put my gaming into my time log made me back off.

After that experiment, I deleted games from my computer and never played again.

Success in Kicking Bad Habits

That was a success story. I can vivisect it for you, so you understand where the success came from.

The trigger for my gaming was a pang of escapism. Whenever I felt bored, tired, and most importantly — purposeless, with no meaning in my life — I played. Getting new levels and killing artificial opponents was a substitute for achieving something in my life.

When I got rid of the trigger, I got rid of the habit. When there was no pang of escapism, the habit couldn’t arise.

(Hacking the habit loop — created by author)

To make it even harder for me to indulge, I installed some environmental firewalls between me and the habit. I deleted my computer games, so even if I’ve felt the pang, I needed to reinstall them first.

However, the nature of the trigger (and my escapism pangs) is very short-lived. When you pull the trigger and there is no shot, you just toss the gun. When you have a pang of escapism and cannot immediately soothe your mind with your escape mechanism, you stop escaping.

So, I created some space between me and the habit, but the thing that helped me most was that I eliminated the trigger for this bad habit from my life. I had seen little sense in my life and that’s why I wanted to escape from it.
When I created my personal mission statement and started pursuing it for real, I had plenty of meaning and purpose in my life. I didn’t need to escape from it.

2. Tougher Cases — Installing Boundaries

We are habit sponges. We go through life and pick habits on autopilot, many of them bad. I’m sure you can think of one or two behaviors you repeat while knowing they aren’t beneficial for you.

I still have quite a bunch of bad habits I cannot quench for good. My sweet tooth is a prime example. I can eat sugar in any form and quantity. I can consume a whole cake in one sitting, no problem.

(… or a giant pancake)

To add insult to the injury, my metabolism seems to magically convert sugar into fat tissue. I can eat meat or carbs and gain little to nothing. But it seems every ounce of sugar I eat turns into an ounce of fat.

I managed to reduce this habit significantly. I almost never eat sweets, I have specific limits for the sweet things I allow myself to eat (homemade cakes, honey, and a few other products).

But I didn’t kick the habit. Every time I’m around sweets there has to be conscious processing of my consumption decisions or I’ll end up indulging in sweets.

3. Reading Fiction — Avoiding the Trigger

My favorite pastime as a teenager was reading. I could read one to three books a day. I developed a habit of finishing books ASAP. It is a bad habit.
It may work for a teenager with no obligations. If you are an adult with a day job, kids, and family responsibilities, it’s a terrible habit.

I just cannot help myself when I get my hands on a good book. I read. I skip meals or sleep. I delay other responsibilities. I read, and read, and read.
I reduced this habit mostly by not having any books immediately available. I don’t shop for new fiction books. I don’t search for them. I stopped going to libraries.

It’s a great example of apparent success. If I don’t have a book nearby, I create the space between the impulse and the habit. Even if I want to read something, I cannot because I have nothing to read.

But I still cannot let a good book sit on a shelf. When I have one, I wolf it ASAP.

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