Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything(60)

Here are the skills you’ve already learned:

How to troubleshoot



How to revise your approach if a habit isn’t working



How to rehearse your habits





This new Process Skill relates directly to growing your habit over time.



The skill of knowing when to push yourself beyond tiny and ramp up the difficulty of the habit





As you do a new habit consistently, you will naturally reach for more. At that point, you can learn to find the edge of your comfort and see how it feels to go just a little beyond. Knowing your comfort edge helps you do a bigger version of your habit without feeling pain or frustration, which will weaken the habit.

Let’s take a look at Sukumar’s push-up habit. How did he know when to grow that habit from two push-ups to three? And how the heck did he get to fifty?

For a habit like this, the comfort edge is fairly easy to find because the signs are physical: burning muscles and labored breathing. In Sukumar’s case, he started with two push-ups and focused on his form. After a week of doing two push-ups after brushing his teeth, he recognized that his form was better even on that last push-up. That recognition of progress inspired Sukumar to do more. So he did. And he kept going.

Sukumar grew his push-up habit effectively because he became skilled at finding his comfort edge. As a result, he pushed himself just enough to make progress. This process repeated itself over the course of days and weeks. However, if there was a time that Sukumar didn’t want to do a lot of push-ups, he didn’t force himself. He did two and felt good about keeping the habit alive. Part of this skill is knowing when to back off and do only the baseline.





Steps in Behavior Design




Step 1: Clarify the Aspiration



Step 2: Explore Behavior Options



Step 3: Match with Specific Behaviors



Step 4: Start Tiny



Step 5: Find a Good Prompt



Step 6: Celebrate Successes



Step 7: Troubleshoot, Iterate, & Expand





Now it’s time to add this skill to our steps in Behavior Design.

Your comfort edge is not a straight line. It’s more like a line on a stock market graph that dips and climbs then dips again. If you keep doing your habit over time, you’ll move your comfort edge permanently—but don’t think too much about that. Focus on finding your comfort edge in the moment so you can make the most skillful choice.

Here are guidelines for knowing how to adjust the difficulty of your habit.

Don’t pressure yourself to do more than the tiniest version of your habit. If you’re sick, tired, or just not in the mood, scale back to tiny. You can always raise the bar when you want to do more, and—surprisingly—you can lower it to tiny when you need to. Flexibility is part of this skill.



Don’t restrict yourself from going bigger if you want to do more. Let your motivation guide you on how much and how hard.



If you do too much, make sure you celebrate extra hard. Pushing yourself too much to expand a habit can create pain or frustration, which will weaken the habit. If that happens (and it will), you can offset the negative feelings by amping up your celebration.



Use emotional flags to help you find your edge. Frustration, pain, and especially avoidance are signs that something is going on with your habit—that you’ve probably increased the difficulty too much, too fast. On the flipside, if you become bored with your habit, you might need to ramp things up.





SKILL SET #4—CONTEXT


Context pertains to what surrounds us. (I use “context” and “environment” as synonyms.)





None of us lives in a habit vacuum. Our environment, which includes people, influences our habitual behaviors more than we recognize or care to admit. Because our habits are the product of our environment to a large degree, getting good at Context Skills is vital for creating change and making it stick.

We’ve touched on some of these Context Skills in previous chapters, specifically in relation to tools and resources. In chapter 3, we met Molly, who was trying to eat healthily but struggling to plan ahead so she could make good choices during the week. Molly skillfully recruited her husband as a resource and found a tool to make her habits more likely to succeed. By recognizing the opportunities available to her and implementing these contextual strategies, she was able to succeed more quickly with her eating habits.

I want to go deeper into this Context Skill, which I describe in this way:



The skill of redesigning your environment to make your habits easier to do





This skill is vital to lasting change. When I was working with Weight Watchers, I asked the CEO if he thought sustainable weight loss was possible without changing one’s environment. His answer? No way. We agreed that if someone loses weight and doesn’t change his or her environment along the way, that person will eventually regain the weight. We both knew that context is powerful.

There are two questions that will guide you to change your environment and reduce the friction between the world around you and your good habits. The first is How can I make this new habit easier to do?