Making Positive Action Default

People are obsessed with having good habits, and for good reason. Good habits lead to consistent positive actions that generate the results (and realities) we envision for our lives. And while I agree that it’s important we have good habits if we want to be more successful, many people don’t actually know how habits work.

Fundamentally, a habit is an unconscious behavior pattern - a mental shortcut that makes you do things without having to think about it. It’s an evolutionary invention that ensures our limited attention and effort doesn’t get wasted on doing the same things over and over again. It’s an adaptation that helps us save our mental bandwidth for things that need to be thought through more.

So when people talk about focusing on building a new habit, what they actually mean is that they want to get consistent with a new action with the hope that the mind will learn to do it automatically and it becomes a habit. And the reason I make that distinction is because the process of getting to that point is one a little different than what you might expect. 

Starting any new action is going to feel hard to do. Our mind will want to hold onto the comfort and familiarity of the way things are, and in an attempt to do so will create resistance. This is commonly known as self-sabotage. That means we must overcome the headwind keeping us from taking action in order to follow through on it.

Most people’s approach to doing that is to use willpower, to grind their way through. But you’ve probably heard that willpower doesn’t work, and that’s because it has two limitations:

1) Willpower is finite and mental fortitude fatigues as it’s being used.

2) Willpower is a conscious process, so in the moments when you aren’t actively telling yourself to ‘push’, you won’t operate at the higher standard you want to.

Instead, the more sustainable intervention is to design your environment. You can architect a ‘wind at your back’ so that conscious action doesn’t require as much effort and you reach the threshold for action more consistently.

And that’s the thing. When you design your environment to support taking action and do so consistently, you’re training and repatterning your unconscious mind. You’re teaching yourself how you exist on a daily basis. Once that’s integrated at an identity level and within your belief system, then you start doing the thing that was once difficult by default. 

That’s what ultimately makes it a habit - the action happens automatically as a part of what you naturally do. And that’s your opportunity to get truly consistent with your best self practices. But we must first earn the right for something to become a habit, and we do that by designing our environment to support our effortful consistency with it until it becomes unconscious.