From Habit Fail to Habit Success

I’ve had numerous readers tell me that they Suck at Habits. And I totally get that, because in 2005, that’s exactly where I was. I sucked at habits. The good news is that I found a smarter way.

I learned to understand that habits are a set of patterns that I just needed to repeat until they became more and more automatic … and that setting up the right environment is everything. Let me repeat that: setting up the right habit environment is everything. If you suck at habits right now, that’s because your environment is set up for you to fail. It’s incredibly hard to defeat a hostile habit environment. So the first thing to know is that you don’t suck, your environment does. You just need to learn to set up a better habit environment.

I also learned that I was often failing because I didn’t believe in myself — I would give up when things got hard, because deep down I didn’t really think I was going to succeed. I didn’t believe, because past evidence from repeated failures told me I most likely wasn’t going to succeed. I had proven to myself over and over again that I sucked at habits, and this belief got in the way of future habit successes.

What’s the way out of this negative feedback loop? You change the message. You tell yourself you’re going to succeed no matter what, and that your past failures don’t count because this time you’re going to put everything you have into it, and not allow failure. You create a habit that’s so easy to do that you can’t possibly fail … and then you let that habit success redefine your belief in yourself.

So the second thing to learn is that you can create a belief and trust in yourself — if you make success your only option. It turns out that the same set of actions will address both of these two things: 1) setting up the right habit environment, and 2) making habit success your only option, so that you can start trusting yourself.

Let’s look at those actions.

Being bad at habits is a fixable problem

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