The Smart Way to Stick to Habits By Leo Babauta Sticking to a new habit isn’t easy — but if you set up your habit change smartly, you can make it stick. Starting a new habit isn’t too hard — we often get excited about starting an exercise plan or diet or waking up early, for example. But a number of obstacles get in the way of sticking to the habit long enough for it to become automatic. Here are the usual obstacles: You lose enthusiasm: Probably the No. 1 reason people fail is that the enthusiasm they feel when they first start the habit, when they’re fantasizing about how great it’ll be, fades away after a few days or a week. Let’s figure out a smart system that gets around these obstacles. Addressing Each Obstacle Let’s address each obstacle one by one, before putting it all together into one system: Enthusiasm: The answer to this is making a big commitment. Let’s take these elements and combine them into a smart system for sticking to habits. The Smart Habit System So let’s put our best practices together: Start small.
Attributes of a high-performing team How do you know you are building a good team? After all, from what you see, everyone attends, shows up on time, and participates in your meetings and team events. Each of the team members seems to get on OK and you are achieving your tasks. So you must be building a good team – right? Here’s a checklist of things that should exist in a good team environment. Does your team exhibit the following characteristics? A high level of inter-dependence among team members Team members have developed mutual trust The team is clear about goals and establishes targets Team member roles are defined Each team member is willing to contribute There’s an environment of healthy contention and communication Team members can examine failure without slipping into personal attacks The team has a capacity to create new ideas Each member knows he can influence the team agenda The leader has good people skills and is committed to a team approach.
10 Steps to Achieving Success in Life The Habit Action List By Leo Babauta There are a ton of people who read self-improvement blogs and books, but never put them into action. They engage in what’s sometimes called “self-improvement porn”. I’ve done this myself in the past — it was a form of fantasizing about how I was going to make my life better, get my shit together. But I didn’t take action because: I was too busy right that moment, so I’d bookmark the article for later. Amazingly, I overcame all of that. I figured out how to go from reading about changes, to actually taking action. What works to create action? Is there a small action I can take right now? If I can run through all of these questions, I’ll actually take action on a new change that I’ve read about. What action will you commit to right now?
Why Innovators Love Constraints - Whitney Johnson by Whitney Johnson | 12:00 PM February 4, 2013 While dreaming and disrupting has unfettered me in many ways, it has shackled me in others. One of the most unexpected was losing a part of my identity. Once the rush of leaving a name-brand corporation wore off, it began to seep in that I could no longer call someone and say “Whitney Johnson, Merrill Lynch.” There’s a good dose of cosmic payback in all this. Fewer resources produce proximity; proximity drives innovation. Workplace proximity can be equally productive. A sense of collaboration and immediacy often happens as people who are cash poor or without needed resources (e.g. young professional, entrepreneur, non-profit), are required to barter, to figure out what they have to bring to the table. Constraints lead to faster feedback. A compelling example of this in the business world is Lit Motors. Constraints can be an indispensable tool of creation. A tightly-lidded box can stifle and suffocate.
Oprah Winfrey: "Align Your Personality With Your Purpose and No One Can Touch You." Oprah Winfrey was so young when she started working as the late-night anchor on WLAC-TV in Nashville, Tenn., she still had an 11 p.m. curfew at home. Yet she was so successful at reciting the news on camera at age 19 that she quickly received an offer from a television station in Atlanta that would have quadrupled her salary, bumping it to $40,000. Her manager in Nashville tried to keep her: “You don’t know what you don’t know,” he told her. “You need to stay here until you can write better, until you can perfect your craft as a journalist.” Winfrey stayed — not because she was afraid to take on a new challenge, she says, but because “I could feel inside myself … that he was absolutely right.” “If I were to put it in business terms or to leave you with a message,” she told a crowd of Stanford Graduate School of Business students, some of whom waited in line 90 minutes to secure a seat close to the stage, “the truth is I have from the very beginning listened to my instincts.
The 5 Ways to Trigger a New Habit In his best-selling book, The Power of Habit (audiobook), author Charles Duhigg explains a simple three-step process that all habits follow. This cycle, known as The Habit Loop, says that each habit consists of… The Trigger: the event that starts the habit.The Routine: the behavior that you perform, the habit itself.The Reward: the benefit that is associated with the behavior. The image below shows how these three factors work together to build new habits. [1] Each phase of the loop is important for building new habits, but today I’d like to discuss the first factor: habit triggers. There are five primary ways that a new habit can be triggered. Trigger 1: Time Time is perhaps the most common way to trigger a new habit. There are also less commonly recognized ways that time triggers our behavior. If these patterns are bad habits, then you may want to take stock of how you feel at this time of day. How I use it: Time-based triggers can also be used to stick with routines over and over again.
Is Your Leadership Showing? Most members of a team know when they’re doing their work well. They often have a particular area of expertise, and they have deadlines and deliverables. For leaders, it’s a bit different. 1. We know that leaders need to be seen by followers--from formal presentations and announcements, to a crisis, to simple “managing by walking around.” As a leader, when do you feel out of your comfort zone? Ask yourself, “How am I visible to others when I don’t want to be?” 2. Many leaders are great at preparing the logistics of leadership (the facts and figures in a plan, or the pitch for a presentation). Just as athletic activities involve physical, mental, and emotional energies, leadership is a “whole-body practice” and requires preparation of the whole person. 3. This is closely related to preparation, because leadership discomfort is greatly enhanced by a lack of preparation. Ask yourself, “How do I display that I am comfortable with the responsibilities and demands of leadership?” 4. 5.
Famous Failures 5 Common Mistakes That Cause New Habits to Fail (and What to Do About Them) Welcome to 2015. It’s New Year’s Resolution time. Depending on where you get your numbers, somewhere between 81 percent and 92 percent of New Years Resolutions fail. [1] Translation: At least 8 times out of 10, you are more likely to fall back into your old habits and patterns than you are to stick with a new behavior. Behavior change is hard. No doubt about it. Why is that? I don’t claim to have all the answers, but after two years of researching and writing about the science of behavior change, let me share the most practical insights I’ve learned so far. PROBLEM 1: Trying to Change Everything at Once SOLUTION: Pick one thing and do it well. The general consensus among behavior change researchers is that you should focus on changing a very small number of habits at the same time. The highest number you’ll find is changing three habits at once and that suggestion comes from BJ Fogg at Stanford University. How tiny? BONUS SOLUTION: Pick a keystone habit. Still struggling?
How Managers Become Leaders Artwork: Adam Ekberg, Country Road, 2005, ink-jet print Harald (not his real name) is a high-potential leader with 15 years of experience at a leading European chemical company. He started as an assistant product manager in the plastics unit and was quickly transferred to Hong Kong to help set up the unit’s new Asian business center. As sales there soared, he soon won a promotion to sales manager. All of Harald’s hard work culminated in his appointment as the head of the company’s plastic resins unit, a business with more than 3,000 employees worldwide. Like Harald, many rising stars trip when they shift from leading a function to leading an enterprise and for the first time taking responsibility for a P&L and oversight of executives across corporate functions. What I found is that to make the transition successfully, executives must navigate a tricky set of changes in their leadership focus and skills, which I call the seven seismic shifts. Specialist to Generalist What is “enough”?
Who are some successful people who failed at their first try? How to Hack Your Habits You know how it goes when you get triggered. Something happens, and before you know it, you are hooked! Pulled into an auto-pilot repertoire of thinking and behaving, which inevitably leads to a less than ideal outcome. These traps are extraordinarily difficult for us to catch in flight precisely because they are so quick and automatic. We are all prone to this automaticity because the mind-body system is hardwired for habit formation. Your thinking and behavior habits get formed over time in two ways: 1.The action or mode of thinking is rewarding in that it either increases pleasure or reduces discomfort. 2. Habits as Subtle Addictions. Of course, some forms of auto-pilot are more obvious. Your more subtle habits can sneak up on you as insidious efforts to reduce discomfort, and derail you from your goals and values. Gaining Access to the Data. The modern definition of ‘hack’ is to “use a computer to gain unauthorized access to data in a system.” Learning to Read the Dashboard.
How to Get Feedback When You're the Boss - Amy Gallo - Best Practices The higher up in the organization you get, the less likely you’ll receive constructive feedback on your ideas, performance, or strategy. No one wants to offend the boss, right? But without input, your development will suffer, you may become isolated, and you’re likely to miss out on hearing some great ideas. So, what can you do to get people to tell you what you may not want to hear? What the Experts Say Most people have good reasons for keeping their opinions from higher ups. “People with formal power can affect our fate in many ways — they can withhold critical resources, they can give us negative evaluations and hold us back from promotions, and they can even potentially fire us or have us fired,” says James Detert, associate professor at the Cornell Johnson Graduate School of Management and author of the Harvard Business Review articles “Debunking Four Myths About Employee Silence” and “Why Employees Are Afraid to Speak“. Start anonymously It can be hard to get people to open up.