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2 Note: This e-book is related to my blog post about habits. Check out the post here. 1. Awareness. Everything starts with an awareness of your current situation and a decision to change your life in some way. It can be a big change (eg. quitting smoking) or a small one (eg. brushing your teeth every morning). Just remember that when you make the decision to start a new habit, it also matters when and where you make it. The time and the place has to be perfect! For example, it s very easy to make a decision to start eating healthy while you are in a hamburger restaurant with your mouth full of cheeseburger. The rationale behind this is that you are very content when eating your burger and it is very easy to make promises in that moment. In reality, those promises turn out to be very hard to fulfill when the happiness fades away and you feel hungry again. Joe became aware that his current working habits were ineffective. He stayed up late, woke up late and he didn t have a plan for dealing with his distractions. He understood that the best way to solve the problem was to wake up at 5.30 am and get his work done before he hit the office.

3 2. Motivation and mindsets. Our second step involves motivation and the rationale behind your new habit. For example, what are you going to achieve with this improvement? Is it losing weight? Is it living a healthier lifestyle? Being more productive? Earning more money? Whatever the reason is, it has to be compelling enough to make you want the change. Without proper motivation, forming a new habit is going to be very hard. When you decide to implement a new habit in your life, you must also internalize some mindsets too. Depending on the habit you are trying to create, it may require more or less consistency, persistency and yes, some will power (although your habit shouldn t be based solely on willpower). If the change is a bigger one, it will require more effort on your part. Mental preparation will help you to deal with the setbacks and obstacles that might occur. Joe s main motivation was to reduce stress and kick procrastination s butt. He understood that this may not be easy and there would be setbacks on his journey. For example, he knew that waking up early wasn t going to be easy at first. Nevertheless, he was committed to make the change because he understood the benefits of it. Finally he could get the work done and it wouldn t stress him out anymore.

4 3. Preparation. Every habit starts with an preparation phase. For example, the preparation for starting a healthy eating habit could be going to the grocery store to buy some carrots as your morning and afternoon snacks for the next day. Not only is the physical preparation important, but so is the mental preparation. If you recognize that your friend s birthday is coming next weekend and you are still trying to keep a healthy diet, you can prepare yourself mentally beforehand. You should also prepare by defining your boundaries. You could decide that on Saturdays you will allow yourself some sweets, but hold back every other day. These boundaries will be your guide when you re living with the new habit every day. Joe decided to start packing his office stuff into his briefcase the night before and get his clothes ready in the bathroom, so that in the morning he wouldn t have to dress in the dark bedroom and wake up his wife. He also made sure that his home laptop was ready on the workroom desk for when he woke up. After taking a quick shower, dressing, shaving and brushing his teeth, Joe would be ready to start working at 5.45am.

5 4. Launch phase. The time that you will launch your new habit matters as well. For example, the middle of the holiday season may not be the best time to do start a healthy eating habit because there are too many temptations around. Take a close look at your calendar and pick the optimum starting time for your habit. There are always going to be days when there is a great danger of slipping out of your new habit, like on holidays and birthdays. That s why you should pick the right start date for your new good habit and make starting it easier for yourself. Joe was about to go on a business trip very soon, so he knew that this wouldn t be the best time to start his new habit of waking up early. He decided to start with the habit after the trip instead.

6 5. Execution. You have now reached the execution phase of your habit and believe me when I tell you that this will be a test of endurance! First, you should understand the rocket launch phase when forming new habits: you will feel the old habits starting to kick in and this will make the first days even harder (or longer, depending on the habit). Let s say you re trying to cut down sugar out of your diet. Rest assured, every candy and every sweet will look very tempting and your mind will try to find excuses to slip back into your old habit. Here are some tricks that I have used myself to help you stick with your new habits: a) Make it visual. Have your end goal (what you want to achieve with the habit) where you can see it. For instance, I have a picture of an athlete winning a race on my computer desktop. The picture gives me motivation to keep exercising, even if I m not going to win the IronMan in Hawaii someday ;) b) Define a daily goal. In order to shift my eating habits towards more healthier ones, I bought a book called Racing Weight: How to Get Lean for Peak Performance (aff-link). It provides a diet quality score and daily eating points, which can either be increased or decreased based on your eating habits. Obviously, I want to reach as many points as possible in one day and this table helps me to adjust my diet accordingly. c) Don t break the chain. This popular productivity technique was created by a comedian named Jerry Seinfeld it s perfect for creating new habits too. The idea is to mark a red X on a wall calendar on any of the days when you have executed your new habit. Once you have successfully started to execute your habit, you will start to see a chain forming on your calendar. You won t want to break the chain and this stops you slipping out of the habit and starting all over again. Consistency is the key to any habit. To help with this aspect, try to execute the habit the same way every day, by doing it at the same location and at the same time (thanks John for the reminder :). For example, I like to write before going to work every morning, starting at 6.15 am, at my kitchen table. This is the optimum time and place for me and makes the habit easy to execute. Finally, there are still two points to understand when it comes to the execution of habits. Firstly we need to consider how long it takes until a new habit is formed and secondly how we can form multiple habits at once. Certain habits are formed faster than others. If you try to stop smoking, it may require a lot more effort than just the 21-30, which is a very commonly heard advice.

7 Clearly, the amount of time needed to kick a habit is dependent on which type of habit it is. Some habits may take conscious effort for a longer period of time before your new habit comes naturally to you. Another common piece of advice is that it is not wise to form multiple habits at once. Most of the time this advice is very sound, but there are exceptions to this rule. If a bad habit supports another, then it is reasonable to create multiple good habits to counteract the old ones. For example, some years ago I wanted to go to gym (habit #1). I also realized that this wouldn t be possible if I didn t also make adjustments to my morning routines. I decided to become an early riser (habit #2), so that I had time to go the gym before hitting the office. In this situation, I was able to form two new habits at once. Those same habits are still a part of my life, 5 years after I started executing them. Today, Joe started executing his new habit. He woke up, walked to the bathroom half-asleep, showered, shaved and brushed his teeth. He got dressed and walked to his workroom, stretched a bit and fired up his computer. The next couple of days were harder. He tried to come up with excuses for not waking up at 5.30am. Then he remembered that this was the rocket launch phase of his new habit it s supposed to be difficult at the beginning! Joe got out of bed even if his body resisted, then went through his bathroom routine and turned on his computer. He became happier with every new red X mark on his wall calendar and he didn t break the chain after all!

8 6. Exceptions and allowances. Exceptions are part of the game when it comes to forming new habits. In a ideal situation you d execute your new habit on a daily basis, but sometimes this is not possible. Waking up at 5.00 am to work on your projects may not be possible if you re travelling. Or you might have to do an exception if your mom s birthday coming soon and you have stopped eating sweets. If you are aware of the exceptions beforehand, you can allow for them and remember that it might not be possible to stick to your habit all of the time. Joe came home from his business trip at 1.30am one night and knew he would feel very tired when he woke up the next morning. He knew that it would not be possible to wake up early, so he allowed himself a lie-in. Although he knew he would know break the chain, Joe also understood that his number one priority was the well-being of his body. After allowing himself one lie-in, Joe returned to his new habit the next day by waking up at 5.30am.

9 7. Knowing your triggers. Learn to know what triggers your habit, whether that is a location, a time or other people. Learn to identify your triggers and make a plan to avoid them. For example, if you know that there are delicious cookies served in your company s cafeteria and you like to eat them while drinking coffee, you could eat a piece of dark chocolate before going to the cafeteria. This should diminish the temptation to have unhealthy snack with your morning coffee. There was one thing that made it hard for Joe to wake up: he used to watch the Game of Thrones every Monday and Wednesday nights. This show was on very late, so watching it made Joe very sleepy the next morning. To avoid this, Joe decided to record the episodes to his digital set-top box so that he could view them another time. It didn t matter that much if he couldn t see the episodes right away. All that mattered was that he saw the episodes.

10 8. Identify your support group. You can create some new habits, but then you may need some help in forming others. For example, you might need some help when you try a new diet. There are plenty of other people who are in a same situation as you and they know that you are dealing with things like cravings. Your family, friends or colleagues can also form a support group. They can help you with forming a good habit and they can get you back on track if you slip back into old habits. Joe sometimes needed encouragement to continue with his habit. Although he knew that the habit was important to his success, he was facing some hard times as well. At one point he had to leave a party early so that he could still wake up at 5.30am. Joe s wife was very supportive. She encouraged Joe to continue with his new habit, since she could see positive changes: he was more energetic, productive and didn t procrastinate anymore.