I just heard a great piece on the radio this morning, about habits. I’m all about habits – those little individual, innocuous behaviors that we all have, that are wasteful of increasingly precious resources.
Stanford professor Dr. BJ Fogg is working from the theory that habits are unconscious (duh!) and in order to change them, you need to start with baby steps. And, this is the real reason why so many people fail at their new year’s resolutions – as the professor describes it, resolutions are abstract ideas, not tied to a single behavior. But, to make that resolution reachable, all you have to do is break it down into 30 second increments to eliminate decision-making from the sequence. If you have to decide (am I going to the gym today?), you’ve left yourself open to talking yourself out of it.
So what habit could you green? You probably don’t make a decision to leave the water running while you’re brushing your teeth, or to grab 20 napkins from the to-go counter, or to leave the lights on all over the house. To change unconscious behaviors like these, make one decision now (turn the water off; take 1 napkin; hit the light switch every time you go through a doorway) and work at it until this little action becomes a habit.
Recent Comments