Building a habit — You should try this!

Every new year starts with new rituals, goals, and plans to introduce a new change into life, mostly focusing on building better habits. But, as the day and date changes, it gets harder to keep track of these very rituals, goals, and plans, and slowly the next year comes around the corner. So, the only habit that seems to build over the past year is making these grand rituals, goals, and plans — this is the irony of habits!

A walk back to the childhood

Habit building takes determination, motivation, and consistency for a certain period of time. Let’s take a walk back to childhood to discuss one of the very first of habits — brushing teeth. Almost (I think it is 100%) every one of us was able to build this habit successfully. So, what was the golden recipe for this habit? What steps did we take? Was there an underlying system behind it that we fail to see for new habits?

I suggest taking a pause here, think about this habit for a minute or two, and then proceed further.

Habit Building Recipe

Let’s discuss the brushing teeth habit in the context of the following points.

The final picture

Every habit has a purpose, otherwise what is the point of creating one, right? Defining this final picture is the first major step in the habit building process. Asking questions like, what mental, spiritual, physical, and materialistic benefits will I receive by building this new habit?

For brushing teeth, let’s agree that all kids and adults alike are afraid of doctors. So, never visiting a doctor was/is a great final picture to have.

Recognizing the short term failure(s)

This is the hardest part to do in the habit building process because most of the times the short term failures are inherently hard to visualize, and their repercussions do not outweigh the benefit value immediately, instead, they compound over time.

For brushing teeth, some of the short term failures were bad breath, food not tasting good, people shying away from talking, and etc. Now, if observed closely, running into these short term failures don’t affect the final picture immediately. Instead, their results compound over time to outweigh the final picture, tooth decay and a visit to the doctor.

Keeping it consistent

Consistency is the final and most crucial piece of converting a task from a mere once in a while repetition into a habit. If you nail this down, you are golden! To incorporate consistency, you will need to use your creativity to fill spots in your day with this new habit. A good strategy that works most of the time is trying to define an association (prerequisite or post-completion) with an existing habit or a major task of your day.

For brushing teeth, it became a prerequisite to starting a day and a post-completion activity for the last meal.

Aha, moment! Right? 💡

Concluding thoughts

The next time you decide to build a new habit, try to define these 3 points as explicitly you can. Write them down on a paper, visualize them, recognize them, and stick to them!

I hope this recipe helps you with many more new habits and years to come, cheers!