You’ve surely heard the phrase “Go big or go home” and been encouraged to go hard and fast when setting and achieving your goals… Well, not in this post. This post is all about how to go small and slow so you can actually reach those big goals of yours. How might you be doing this? Micro habits!
Through the use of micro habits you can make small consistent changes to a particular behaviour over time and eventually shape it into the big overall behaviour that will help you achieve your goals! Sound good? Let’s get started!
This post is all about micro habits!
Why you don’t reach your goals:
You might set the best goal, you may have the perfect plan. You are organised, you feel committed, you have the drive. You have it all set out in your head, you can envision it. You have all the ingredients in place you can imagine the sweet satisfaction of when you finally achieve your goal. Yet despite all of this, you fail to achieve your goal and it leaves you frustrated and wondering why you didn’t reach it.
Here are some common reasons people do not reach their goals:
Your goals stop you before you properly start them:
It is so easy to get excited and be super aspirational when setting your goals. It is equally easy to be overly aspirational and overestimate your abilities starting out. So while you may get super pumped thinking about starting the process… when you go to start it, your goal suddenly seems like a mammoth task and it gets overwhelming. “How could I possibly do _____ every day?” you may think. This overwhelming feeling can potentially be paralyzing and stop you from actually starting.
You can’t achieve a goal without actually starting!
Your motivation dwindles:
At the start of your journey towards achieving your goal you’ll feel super motivated and encouraged by those thoughts of achieving your goal and the excitement of starting. Then, when you are getting close to achieving your goal, you’ll get another burst of motivation, you’ll be driven by the satisfaction of achieving it. “I’m so close, I can do it” you’ll think.
But what happens in the middle?
The middle of the journey is the tough part. It is the point when you feel like you have put in so much effort and yet your achieving your goal still seems so far away. The point where you feel start feeling discouraged because you put put pressure on yourself to achieve your goal fast and it just isn’t happening. It is where you have to fight your dwindling motivation and persevere, you have to keep choosing to continue. This is usually the point where most people give up.
They involve a choice:
When undertaking a goal you have a commitment to doing the steps you need to do to achieve it EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. You have to decide to do it. This is great and all when you are motivated- it’s an easy decision! However, when you have been going at it for a while or one of the steps is unpleasant for whatever reason you may stop enjoying the process. This is where you unconsciously (or not) decide to no longer be committed to your goal by making up excuses, which eventually inhibits your progress.
Depleted willpower:
Willpower is not a limitless resource. You only have a certain amount of willpower that you can exercise every day. When you run out of willpower it is easy to talk yourself out of things and give in to temptations.
This is the problem with these big overarching goals you set for yourself. Generally, these goals need A LOT of willpower to achieve. In a general lifestyle, where you are constantly exercising willpower to stay concentrated at work, resist the temptation to continue to snooze your alarm in the morning.
Make micro habits become your new best friend!
Why Micro Habits Work:
They help you actually want to start:
Micro habits make starting the process of achieving your goals less paralysing and overwhelming. This is because they break down your big scary overall goal into smaller achievable steps that generate a starting point that feels doable. If you have a mentally doable starting point it makes it so much easier to start.
Its the difference between saying to yourself “I’m going to go out and run 5 km four days a week” (end goal) and “I will run 1km on 2 days this week” (micro habit). Which seems more appealing to go and start with? The micro habit, right?
They are flexible:
You can use micro habits to help you with many different goals. Whether your goal is to introduce new behaviours into your life, increase behaviours you already have in place or decrease unwanted behaviours, micro habits should be your go to.
They are no-brainers:
The beauty of micro habits is that they are easy. They are achievable. They are designed to make you think “Oh that’s not so bad, I could totally do that” to the point where you will actually do it. They are a no-brainer and this is what makes them effective: because they are easy you are less likely to make excuses and more likely to stick to doing them consistently.
Consistency is the key to making these habits automatic. Consistency is the key to achieving your goals.
They become automatic behaviours:
Do a micro habit long enough and consistently enough and it will become an automatic behaviour.Automatic behaviours are great! They are the things in life that you do without thinking, like brushing your teeth before bed for example. Automatic behaviours bypass the need for willpower because it is something you naturally do – a part of your non-negotiable routine. You don’t need motivation for an automatic behaviour, you don’t need rewards, you don’t even end up craving doing an automatic behaviour, you simply just do it. How good would that be if it were one of your goals?
Disclaimer: Micro Habits are a slow game
This is just a wee disclaimer for those of you who think micro habits are a shortcut to achieving your goals asap. They don’t. Like I said before, the idea behind micro habits is to start small and build up over time with consistency. This means it is a gradual process. It is not something that you can just jump into and start achieving all of your goals in a matter of a week. It will take time, but if you are willing to persevere, micro habits and make a BIG difference to your life over time.
How To Make Micro Habits Work For You
Start with your end goal
A great place to start is right at the end because that’s where you are hoping to get to, right? So what does “the end” of this behaviour look like for you? What is your final goal? Have a proper think about it. All goals are either based off of an explicit behaviour or are underpinned by a particular behaviour. Find what behaviour you want to consistently be doing (or not doing) by the end of your journey.
Examples:
Goal 1 (explicit behaviour): “I want to be able to run 15km three mornings a week before work”
Goal Example (behaviour is not explicit): “I want to read 12 books this year”Target habit underpinning this goal: “Reading for 1 hour before bed each night”
Write it down somewhere for yourself so you can always refer back to it when needed.
Break it down into small achievable steps (micro habits):
This is a key step! This is where the “micro” part of micro habits really comes in.
You need to take the end goal that big goal you just wrote for yourself and break it down into actionable and achievable steps. The first one of these steps needs to be so ridiculously small that you will laugh at the thought of actually doing it. For example, using the goals above, you micro habits could be:
Goal 1: Lay your running clothes out the night before, just before you get into bed so that they are ready when you wake up.
Goal 2: Read for 2 minutes before going to sleep
Attach your micro habit to a trigger moment:
Life gets busy. With all the things fighting for your attention in a day, it can be easy to forget about doing your micro habit.
Attaching your micro habit to a trigger moment can be a great way of reminding yourself to complete your micro habit. This is because a trigger moment is normally an everyday habit in your routine, which means you’ll naturally get a daily reminder to work on your micro habit. If you go back and look, you’ll see that the two goals we have been working with are already attached to trigger the trigger moments of “before going to sleep” and “before getting into bed”.
Examples of trigger moments to attach your micro habit to:
- When brushing your teeth
- While eating breakfast
- After you walk into a particular room
- Before or after breakfast, lunch, or dinner
- When you are watching a TV show
- When you are on the toilet/after you go to the toilet
- As soon as you wake up
- Right before you get into bed
- When you walk through the front door
- Before you go to sleep
- Before/after you check your social media accounts
Fit it in and don’t give yourself the opportunity to opt-out
The point of a micro habit is that is small and fast (especially at the start). This means you have no excuse. Fit it into your day! It doesn’t have to be done at a specific time of day, so long as you consistently do your micro habit. Don’t give yourself the opportunity to talk yourself out of it by telling yourself you haven’t got enough time. If you want something badly enough, you will make time for it (that’s a simple fact in your life). How badly do you want to achieve your goals?
Increase the intensity of your micro habit over time:
As you start to feel comfortable with your micro habit and continue to be more consistent with completing it, you can start gradually increasing its intensity. The point of micro habits is not to stop you making progress and achieving goals, so make sure you actually do make it more difficult over time.
For example, to increase the intensity of Goal 2, you could aim to read for 5 minutes before going to sleep rather than 2 minutes. For goals like Goal 1, multiple behavoiurs may need to be formed using micro habits in order to achieve your overall goal. In this case, if you no longer have behaviours to work on to help you get organised and prepared for your run, you can start focusing on your running behaviours. Remember start small and start easy, try running for 1km rather than 15km.
Track your progress, review frequently and reward yourself:
You are trying to achieve an overall goal that you set for yourself. When goal setting it is always important to check in with your goal to see if it still fits and if it is something that you still want. It is also equally important to track your progress and be sure to reward yourself occasionally to help you stay motivated.
This is still true for working with micro habits. You need to be tracking your progress so that you can monitor your consistency and know when to increase the intensity of the micro habit. It is also nice to be conscious of your progress so that you can give yourself recognition and reward yourself along the way. Remember this is going to be a slow (but worthwhile) journey and it might be tough at times. In these times it’s also great to be able to have an overview of your progress to help you be reminded of how well you are doing.
If you would like help tracking your progress, download this handy printable chuck full of self improvement goodness.
“Your habits will determine your future” -Jack Canfield
How do you want your future to look? Do you want it to be a future where you have achieved those awesome goals that you set for yourself?
If the answer is yes, now you know exactly what to do. Start making those small changes and use micro habits to start shaping those behaviours for success!
