Building Positive Routines

By Charlie Rogers

Ever had that new habit that you want to pick up? To meditate, read every day, run more often or eat a more balanced diet for example? Perhaps it was a new year's resolution that prompted a change you wanted to adopt, but it didn’t stick. Don’t worry, you’re not alone. More than 80% of new year resolutions fail to hit their mark. But how can you be in the 20%?  Start small. Talk to others about it. Remind yourself why. Think in weeks, not days.

Start small.

Ambitious goals are great. They force us outside our comfort zones and challenge us to reach for those things that seem almost impossible. But to try to go from 0 to 100 makes maintaining the routine in the long-run so much more difficult. Yes, we should have those ambitious goals, but it’s important to break them down into smaller ones first. SMART goals can be really helpful here.

If your goal is to ‘read more’ then start by challenging yourself to read for 10 minutes twice a week. This might seem really easy. But, that’s the point. That sense of achievement is a key motivating factor.

You need to make it as easy as possible for you to start the habit you’re trying to create. To pick up the book and to start reading it. You’ll likely read more than 10 minutes and then you can add in an extra day a week and go from there.

Talk to others about it.

Tell a family member or colleague that you’re going to do this new challenge. Post it out on social media where friends will offer their support and encouragement. Sharing the goal can make it up to 5 times more likely to stick. It can make us more accountable.

It can also be great to speak to others who are into the routine you’re trying to create. If you want to run more, speak to runners to learn about their experiences and to find out what helped them. But be wary of relying on other people as your motivation. You’ll need to do this routine when nobody is watching so make sure you find value from it beyond what you can share on social media.

Remind yourself why.

There was likely a motivation behind the new habit you wanted to develop into your routine. Although these can be positive as well as negative, they can be powerful reminders on those difficult days. Does the routine help you in other areas of your life? Perhaps your ambition to get fit was because you were out of breath walking with friends, but through going to the gym or joining a running club, this new habit has also enabled you to make new friends, have positive experiences and feel healthier.

Think in weeks, not days.

It can be really tempting to want to ‘streak’ a new routine. To do it every day. It adds a cumulative number to your ‘success’ that you can share with friends and family of recognition of your achievements. But, it can also be really dangerous. Missing that one day due to unforeseen circumstances can make you feel like you’re back at the beginning. Which of course isn’t true. Running 99 out of 100 days does not mean you’re starting over. You’re already so much further ahead than you were 99 runs ago.

A great way to overcome this is to think in weeks, not days. Focus on measuring the frequency of the habit by the occurrence over a week. This will make you resilient to those difficult days and will allow you to see the bigger picture of the positive routines you’re building.