Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything(73)

If you can’t remap the old prompt to the new habit, your choice of a new behavior might not have been so “golden” after all. That’s okay. You won’t always nail it the first time. Maybe you have an unusually steep Downhill Habit that you’re trying to replace. Perhaps you can’t make the old habit harder to do or you can’t make it less motivating. If this is the case, a good next step is to go back and select another new habit to swap in.

If you’re still having trouble, then move on to the next step.





Adjusting both ability and motivation to swap a habit


If remapping the prompt doesn’t stop your old habit, then you arrive at this step. At this point, you can be pretty sure that your old habit is either more motivating or easier to do than the new habit—or both. Mapping the bad habit and the new habit to the Behavior Model helps you see what’s going on. The old habit is farther above the Action Line, which means the old habit is more compelling to you, and so you will keep doing it instead of the new habit.





To change that, you have four options as shown in the next graphic.





Focusing your energies on any of the boxes will help you make the swap, but if you make all four adjustments, you will be even more successful in swapping your new habit for the old one. The next graphic shows the ideal scenario.





However, not all the adjustments will work. You may not be able to reduce motivation for your old habit. That’s okay. As long as you can make the old habit harder to do and the new habit easy to do and motivating, you will probably succeed in making the habit swap.





If Nothing So Far Has Worked . . .


Don’t despair. You still have options. This process is about finding what works for you. It’s like shopping for new shoes. The first pair of shoes you try on looked good on the shelf, but when you put them on your feet, they don’t fit right. Don’t force the fit, and don’t blame yourself or give up. Find another pair of shoes to try on instead.

And here are some other options to try.

Option A: Find a better new habit to swap in and follow the steps again.



Option B: Try the swap in a limited way. See how it goes for three days, then decide what to do next.



Option C: Return to phase one of the masterplan and practice other new habits to build your skills and confidence and shift your identity. Address this persistent bad habit later.





This Process Is a Skill


There is no single technique that works for stopping all habits. But now there is a process, and you can start using my Behavior Design Masterplan immediately. And you will get better with practice. You will become more proficient at pinpointing pivotal issues and resolving problems.

You might have a bad habit of always being late. Or perhaps you have a bad habit of procrastinating. These are special cases because those bad habits are created by behaviors you are not doing. When you are dealing with habits of omission or avoidance, you need to get behaviors to happen rather than stopping them. For these types of bad habits, the skilled Habiteer will focus on phase one and loop back to create new habits until the problem is resolved.

This process is a skill. When you find what works for you, future challenges will be easier to tackle. So keep going.

With each successful result, revisit your Swarm of Behaviors diagram to find another specific habit to unwind. This is how you unravel the unwanted general habit in a steady, predictable, and reliable way.

You’ll find patterns like I did when I discovered that for me it’s often most effective to make the unwanted habit physically hard. And you’ll recognize situations that make a bad habit easier to do and you’ll learn how to avoid those.

You will also find people in your life who make bad habits easier to do. In some approaches to behavior change, those people are called enablers. They are not to be underestimated! I’ll never forget a woman I’ll call Martha—someone I met when I was doing Weight Watchers a few years ago (partly because I was training their product team and partly because I wanted to lose some weight). Martha had been doing Weight Watchers for a number of years with varied success. She’d lose a few pounds here, gain a few pounds there, but overall, she couldn’t seem to gain any traction. One day in our group meeting, someone brought up the topic of food temptations created by other people. Nearly everyone had a story about birthday cakes in the break room or a coworker who always invited you to eat half of her cookie, and Martha shared a story from her week. During football season, her family gathered every Sunday to watch the games on TV, and her sister-in-law would make cheese dip and her husband would order pizza. This was a big hurdle for Martha.

She explained how she’d eaten a big healthy meal before the game last Sunday so she wouldn’t be tempted. She was happily sitting on the couch with her son, cheering on their favorite team. The pizza arrived at halftime, and her husband grabbed a big slice. As he walked by her, he waved it under her nose, and said, “Oh, Martha, doesn’t that smell good?” Everyone laughed. Everyone but Martha, that is. She had a good sense of humor about his jokes, but this time she was mad. It wasn’t the first time he’d teased her by pressuring her to eat whatever he was having. Sometimes she caved, sometimes she didn’t. She thought that the pizza incident felt different because it embarrassed her in front of the rest of the family. She told us that her husband slept on the couch for a few days—but more important, it made her realize that he had been undermining her success with Weight Watchers by enabling her bad habits.