What’s The Key To Making Positive Habits Stick? Get Rid Of Motivation.

Creating new habits is like pulling teeth.

One habit I’m great at is my ability to become distracted. I’ve damn near perfected it. It’s easy to do, it requires little motivation, and everything seems to be built to pull my focus.

Habits are hard, especially when you have a finite amount of attention to dedicate to any one thing.

You have to force yourself into a new way of doing things, and often, the habit change can be painful to some degree, like eating less, stopping nicotine, or making cold calls as an introvert.

Pain doesn’t translate well into motivation unless you’re a psychopath, which now thinking about it, I might be.

So what do we do?

Stop relying on motivation.

Motivation is fickle.

“You can’t get yourself to do what you don’t want to do,” teaches BJ Fogg. Motivation is unreliable, complex, and constantly fluctuates.

When you rely on motivation alone, your habits likely fail unless you push through them with brute force, which most people are terrible at.

We like things to be easy.

So, make your habits tiny, tiny, tiny.

Creating a new habit with little motivation is possible by making it easy.

BJ calls these Tiny Habits. You need to find ways to lower your ability and “make the behavior so tiny that you don’t need much motivation.”

Simplicity leads to consistency when it comes to designing new habits.

Ask yourself these questions to determine what’s restricting your ability to make a habit simple:

• What’s making the habit hard to do?
• Do you have enough time?
• Do you have enough money?
• Do you have enough mental energy?
• Do you have the physical capability?
• Does the habit conflict with your current routine?

Once you find areas of restriction, find ways to lower the tensions and make the habit easier and more automatic.