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What stands between where you are now and where you want to be? The answer may be more simple than you think.

Your outcomes are a lagging indicator of the habits you keep. Each time you repeat a behavior, you reinforce the habit that reflexively caused that behavior in the first place. If the behavior is positive and serves to improve your life, automating that behavior will be beneficial. On the contrary, if you repeat a behavior that does not serve you, you will move further from your goals.

Through myelination, the process in which your brain wraps nerve connections with a performance enhancing sheath called myelin, your brain builds super highways to speed up and automate the tasks you perform repeatedly. The trouble is that myelin does not discriminate between good and bad habits. Just as putting your running shoes on first thing out of bed in the morning reinforces positive health habits, grabbing a bag of potato chips and turning on the television as soon as you get home from work can become a reinforced and automated task.

The habit execution process is comprised of four steps. They are:

• Cue
• Craving
• Response
• Reward

When you climb out of bed in the morning and see your running shoes (cue), you are reminded that your morning run, once executed enough will give you the health you desire (craving). Thinking about the beach body you’ll have on your upcoming trip will trigger you to take that run (response), even though you’re tired, because you feel great and have already fit better into those pants which were getting snug (reward).

I’ll spare you the process for the downward spiral that would follow a daily crumb covered shirt and binge watching old sitcoms habit. For the habits we wish to make permanent and prevalent, we must make the process easy and remove obstacles. If we wish to de-program a bad habit, we most add obstacles to that habit process.

Building a new habit

Start small. If your track-record says you don’t work out for an hour a day, five times each week, you may find it challenging to commit to this drastic of a behavior change right away. If you miss your goal and only make it to the gym twice each week and tire out after thirty minutes, you’re making it easy to give up and throw in the towel. Meanwhile, if you hadn’t been going in to the gym at all before, you just went an hour each week and four hours per month which you otherwise wouldn’t have.

What is the smallest action, which would contribute to improvements in your habit formation and progress toward your goal? Perhaps the goal is simply to take your gym clothes with you to the office and to be wearing them by 4:00pm each day. Then, even if you don’t make it to the gym, you’ll have an easy to attain win.

Make the habit you are looking to build unavoidable and you will make it inevitable. If your goal is to eat healthier and your fresh fruits are stashed away in the refrigerator or in your pantry, you’ve hidden the cue, making it invisible. Put the fruit in a bowl and display it on your counter so that when you are hungry for a snack, you won’t venture far into the kitchen before it becomes obvious and more convenient than the pint of ice cream in the freezer.

Breaking an old habit

If the first step in eating healthier was to make the good food more obvious, the next ought to be to make the junk foods invisible. If you have a candy dish out on your living room table and you are under the age of eighty or don’t have grand-children, remove it! The same elements are in play and your myelin won’t care if you are reaching for a juicy apple or a Werther’s Original (seriously, why do you have a candy dish?).

Once the cue is invisible, your neural pathways will still tell you to seek out rock candy you’ve always eaten, each time you’re hungry. We need to break the next step in the process and make the craving unattractive. Call out the negative effects these decisions will have on your goals, in this case your health. Simply saying aloud to yourself “if I eat this candy I will get cavities, gain weight, and look less desirable in my speedo” will hopefully reduce the craving and make eating candy seem unattractive. Now, as you make your way to the pantry with the step stool you had to retrieve, to make your access to the sweets you seek more challenging you’ve already made it a challenge to enact the response. If after all of this you’ve still reached the candy dish, it will hopefully seem so repulsive that your next action will be to dump the whole thing into the garbage.

Take action today!

Do a habit audit and make a habit scorecard. Lay out a day in your life on paper. It should look something like this:

Now, simply rate the habits in your day with a “+” if the habit is good and helps you move closer to your goals, “-” if it moves you away from your goals, or “=” if the habit is neutral. There is no template for these scores and they are highly personal and dependent upon where you are and where you want to be. When you are finished, your list might look like the column on the right.

Once you know where you are, it’ll be easier to determine the actions you must take to get where you want to be. Are you clear on your goals? Do you know how to dream big and reverse engineer your biggest goals? If not, check out my recording from my last goal-setting webinar. If you need support in goals and habit management, please connect with me. I’m here to support you.