Habits are the key to long-term success.

Your habits determine how much money you save every month, how healthy your teeth are, and how much sleep you get at night. Your habits determine the quality of your life.

It often seems impossible to break old, bad habits and create new, positive habits. How do most people try to change a bad habit? They try to go cold turkey. (I am never eating sugar again! I will never drink again! I will never date losers again!) Cold turkey and relying on willpower to force the necessary changes rarely works long term.

And you already know this does not work. Even if you are incredibly motivated (and motivation is not always reliable when you are tempted) positive change is hard. 

Create new habits more effectively by avoiding these common mistakes:

1. Changing too much, too soon. A new habit is best implemented in baby steps. If you want to spend two hours each day writing your new book, start with writing 15 minutes every day. Fifteen minutes is two pages, and it gets you in the habit of sitting down and writing when it is time to write. That is the most important first step. If you write two pages per day, in just 90 days you will have 180 pages. That is a book.

Schedule 15 minutes so you do not fail. Start small.

2. Relying on self-discipline. If your habit requires a lot of self-discipline, it will not last. At most, self-discipline should only be required to make a habit of getting started. The best habits are automatic. Self-discipline is not required to brush our teeth or watch the news. If you already have a habit of going to the gym, self-discipline is not required for that either.

Self-discipline is a short-term solution.

Set behavioral changes that are so easy you do not need self-discipline.

3. Expecting a new habit to be easy. Change is not easy. We all become complacent and lazy when we expect a new habit to be easy to implement. We would all be wealthy, in great shape, and speak five languages if creating new habits were a simple matter. New habits take effort and consistency to really stick.

4. Expecting a new habit to be too difficult. The opposite is also true. If you expect the process of implementing a new habit to be exceptionally difficult, you will also struggle. The thought of doing anything that seems really hard can be sufficient reason to never get started in the first place.

New behaviors are easy to implement if you start slowly and have patience. It is moving ahead slowly and having the right amount of patience that is difficult.

5. Relying too much on information. Our society is both blessed and cursed with access to an excessive amount of information. This can create two challenges.

First, it is easy to believe that you do not know enough to take the first step. There is always something out there that you do not know. The need to know everything before getting started can leave you stuck in analysis paralysis.

The belief that knowledge alone is sufficient is just as harmful. You might know how to do pushups, but that does not provide the same results as doing one hundred of them each day.

Some military groups say “60% of information is enough to take action.” If you know 60% of the relevant information, you know enough to move forward. You can figure out the other 40% along the way.

Dropping your negative habits and adding new, supportive habits is the key to changing your circumstances.

Tiny changes are easy to implement and build on. But this approach requires patience and the belief that it can work.

6. Being easily defeated by failures. I have a friend who wants to make healthier food choices and lose about twenty pounds. She met with a nutritionist and joined a gym. She resolved to start on Monday. Motivated and energized by her new initiatives, she arrived at work on Monday to a client who brought in donuts and cupcakes. She ate both. She called me, feeling defeated, that afternoon. “Why bother going to gym when I ate donuts and cupcakes? I need to try again tomorrow.”

Setbacks are going to happen. It is what you do after the setback that matters.

Remember, small actions add up to big results.

Avoid the most common mistakes when attempting to add a new habit to your life and you will find greater success in adding habits that make a positive impact on your life.

What habits do you want to implement?

What do you want to change?

What is working for you to implement positive changes?

Let us know!