BRX Pro Tip: How to Build a Habit
Stone Payton: Welcome back to BRX Pro Tips. Lee Kantor, Stone Payton here with you. Lee, I know you’ve been sharing with me of late and I’ve sort of really, really bought into this, that habits are really more productive, more practical, at least in our world, than goals. But let’s talk a little bit about how to go about building a habit.
Lee Kantor: Yeah, I’ve been reading a lot about habits and the power of habits lately. And a great book that speaks about this is called Atomic Habits by James Clear. And he talks about the four steps to building a habit, to successfully building a habit. And the four steps are cue, C-U-E, craving, response, reward. And I’ll go over each one of those. The cue is it triggers your brain to initiate a behavior. Next is the craving, the cravings are the motivational step. The desire is the response. The response is the habit or action you take. And the reward is the end goal of the habit in order to satisfy us and relieve the craving.
Lee Kantor: So, to stop a bad habit, you just remove the cue and then, that reduces the craving and that kind of helps make the bad habit go away. And to create a good habit is you just make the cue very obvious and easy to see and to do. And that makes the craving more attractive. And then, that makes the response easy and then, the reward is more satisfying. So, a simple way to explain this in terms of getting rid of a bad habit, which is easier to explain that. So, like say, you know, that whenever you walk into the house and there’s a bag of chips on your counter.
Stone Payton: I thought of Oreos actually, but okay.
Lee Kantor: So, those cookies or whatever on your counter, if you just put the snack away in a cabinet, you’re going to be less likely to see it visually. And then, you’ll be less likely to eat it. They say that just moving snacks a couple feet away from you is enough to deter you from, you know, eating them. But if they’re right next to you, you’ll just mindlessly eat them. So, if you can get rid of the cue, then you can get rid of the craving. The same thing is when you want a good habit to take root. You just want to make the cue as easy as possible.
Lee Kantor: So, if you want to make sure that you are going to, let’s say, connect people on LinkedIn. Put in your calendar, connect people on LinkedIn. The first thing in the morning when you look at your calendar, so you’re like, “Oh, yeah, I got to connect people on LinkedIn.” You know, put the reminder right in front your face so that you remind yourself, “Oh, yeah. That’s something I do.” And then, that’s usually all it takes is once you start doing that, you’ll do that. And you’ll do one, two, three, however many you do in that setting. But the important is just make it obvious and put it in front of yourself so that you can take the other four steps and they happen seamlessly.
Stone Payton: Well, I’ll tell you something that’s been helping me more recently, is doing exactly what you’re describing. I’ve started putting it in the calendar. And then, the other layer is another tip that we’ve shared is I have an accountability partner. So, I might have in there on Monday to do it, but then, I got on there on Tuesday to talk to you about it.
Lee Kantor: There you go.
Stone Payton: Yeah. And I’m not going to not do it if I know I got to talk to you about it on Tuesday, right?
Lee Kantor: That’s it.
