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Welcome to episode 207 of The Non-Anxious Leader Podcast. I'm Jack Shitama. This episode drops on Monday, December 26, the day after Christmas. And because I normally record on a Sunday, I'm actually doing this on a Christmas Eve. And I'm doing this as a rebroadcast because I just don't have time to do a full episode. I hope you understand this episode is a rebroadcast from early in 2021, and it's based on my book One New Habit, One Big Goal Change Your Life in Ten Weeks.

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I thought it would be appropriate as we enter 2023 to give you some insight on how habit formation has helped me to get my most important work done. To help you with this, I'm making available a free electronic copy of the book. I'll put a link in the show notes. You don't even have to give me your email address, you just go to the link. You can download the book in any format that works for you, for a Kindle, for a Nook or other Ereader, or as a PDF. I have found that habit formation is the thing that has enabled me to get the things that are important but not urgent done on a regular basis. So if you want to make an impact, I think you will find this helpful. It certainly has helped me.

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So, without further ado, here is episode 207 How to Make Your Habits Work for you.

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Self-discipline is not something that is available at our beck and call. So if you think you are not self-disciplined, you are not alone. Sometimes we have self-discipline when our willpower hasn't been depleted, but other times we don't have so much. And here's the key. People who get the results they want aren't more self-disciplined than others. What they are able to do is concentrate their efforts long enough to develop a positive habit. Once that habit is developed, they are able to do it without thinking and without depleting their willpower.

Then they do it again to add another positive habit. If you apply this process to your life, you will be able to be more productive without depleting your willpower, which will leave you more willpower to deal with the challenges that each day brings. You can apply this process to your spiritual life: to prayer, meditation, reading, scripture, journaling. You can apply it to your professional life: reading, writing, research, planning, sermon, preparation, learning new skills and habits to boost your productivity. You can apply this to your physical life: eating right, exercising, flossing and drinking plenty of water are habits that will help you feel better, live longer and work more effectively.

Gary Keller and Jay Papasan write in their book, The One Thing, The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results, that the research supports that it takes an average of 66 days to develop a new habit. They also caution not to try to develop more than one habit at a time.
Focus on just one thing until it really becomes a habit, and then it will no longer require any willpower. You will just do it. Then you can focus on a new habit. Just imagine if you developed one new habit every 66 days. That would be five new habits a year. And what if you did that for five years? That would be 25 new habits. Do you think your life would be different?

The good news is you can do it. And I'm proof. The thing is, I didn't even know that I was doing it at the time. It just happened. My prayer life improved. I started exercising. And then I realized that there was a common process. I dug into the learning behind this process and began to apply it to other areas of my life. I started several new initiatives in the ministry I serve. I started a blog. I wrote a book. The thing that will make a difference for you is your approach.

And one thing that will help your approach is understanding micro-habits. According to U.S. News and World Report, 80 percent of New Year's resolutions fail by the second week of February. Clearly, this is not a great success rate. The problem is that resolutions are not goals. They are wishes. A New Year's resolution typically is something like I'm going to go to the gym three times a week or I'll no longer eat red meat or I'm going to read my Bible every day.

But these have no end date. They are forever. And the thought of forever can be overwhelming. There is a reason 12-step programs use the mantra "one day at a time." If you think about having to do something forever, you're almost certain to fail. That's why it's important to think in terms of 10 weeks. If you say I'm just going to focus on doing this for 10 weeks, knowing in the back of your mind that at the end of 10 weeks you're likely to have formed a habit and this will become automatic, it will make it easier for you to persist.

The hardest thing about doing this is getting started. And micro-habits help make this easier. They jump start the process by doing everything possible to help you succeed in very small increments. In his book, The Healthy Habit Revolution, Derek Doepker shows that the most important part of developing a habit is getting started. He advocates using micro-habits to develop momentum. A micro habit is something so small it's almost impossible not to do it. In fact, you would likely scoff at it if somebody recommended it as your starting point.

Let's say your goal is to read the Bible for 30 minutes a day first thing in the morning. A micro habit would be to set a goal of sitting in the easy chair where you plan to read and holding your Bible for two minutes each day for the first seven days. You don't actually have to read it. Just sit there with it. You may read it if you like, but your goal is satisfied after you sit for two minutes while holding it.

This sounds laughable, but after seven days you're more likely to start reading the Bible for five minutes per day. Then after another week for 15 minutes. You get the idea. The point here is to overcome the friction that keeps you from getting started. And when you have a ridiculously small goal, like a micro habit, it helps you to get started and to build momentum.

This is the idea behind "think big, act small." Think about the things that you can do to improve your life: pray and meditate more regularly, exercise, eat better, manage your time better, spend more time with those who matter most, read books that grow your mind, focus on the things that work that will make the biggest difference.

Do you feel overwhelmed? You know, all the things you'd like to do, but you can't do them all at once. In fact, you should only work on one thing at a time to make it a habit. In their book, The One Thing, Keller and Papasan write that if you want to see positive change in your life, you need to think big and act small. This one little saying changed my life.

I had already established the habits of prayer, meditation and regular exercise in my life, but I felt there was something more that I needed to do. While on vacation, I set two major goals for myself: to start a blog and to write a book. Since I was pretty good at establishing habits. I decided I would add 30 minutes of focused work to my morning routine.

Since I have a day job, I knew my willpower would be depleted in the evening. I needed to do this before I went to work. Setting a morning goal gave me the best chance for success. It worked. In one year I started a blog, published 28 blog posts and wrote a 35,000-word manuscript. All this in about 30 minutes per day for an average of five days per week.

You can have big goals for your life. If you think about them and you get excited, that's great. If you think about them and get overwhelmed, then you need to break it down into smaller chunks. In fact, some people would argue you should start with the smallest of chunks. That's what micro-habits are.
But thinking big and acting small is the way to accomplish the things that most matter to you. This will help you to get started as well as to make progress, which is your biggest motivator.

In their article, "The Power of Small Wins," Teresa Amabile and Stephen J. Cramer's share their research on workplace motivation. They write, "It turns out that ordinary scientists, marketers, programmers and other unsung knowledge workers whose jobs require creative productivity every day have more in common with famous innovators than most managers realize. The workday events that ignite their emotions, fuel their motivation and trigger their perceptions are fundamentally the same."

What is it that fuels their motivation? Incremental progress. They go on to write, "Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation and perceptions during a workday, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work. And the more frequently people experience that sense of progress, the more likely they are to be creatively productive in the long run."

This research applies to creativity among knowledge workers, but this progress principle applies to any meaningful endeavor. Making progress toward your goal of developing a habit creates a positive feedback loop. Not only will you be getting closer to your goal, but the progress itself will motivate you. You will get excited about the things that are actually happening. This will make you more likely to keep going. This is why micro-habits are so important when you are just beginning.
The most important way to jumpstart your effort is to make progress, and the thing that will stop you dead in your tracks is procrastination. The more you procrastinate, the harder it is to get started and the worse you will feel. Conversely, incremental progress, small wins, will get you going. This is essential when you are beginning. Ideally, over time you will learn to love the process of making progress and the progress will multiply exponentially. The more progress you make, the more motivation you have and the more momentum you develop.

This leads to greater progress and greater results. And the way to get there is to have a plan. The best way to develop a good habit is with a good plan, this conserves your willpower because it reduces the amount of effort used in decision making.

Early on in my time as a runner, I was training for a 5K. I used a plan that had a specific activity and goal for each day of the week. Five of those days were runs of varying lengths and each had a target time. So the goal for those days was laid out in a way that minimized the amount of thinking I had to do. The other two days of the week were rest days. Those were a slam dunk.

The training plan reduced the amount of friction that might prevent me from running. I went to bed the night before knowing exactly what my distance and time goals were. I don't remember if I actually did every workout as this was quite a few years ago. Life can get in the way sometimes. I do know I must have done enough of the workouts to get positive results. I also don't remember if I hit the time goal every workout. I'm guessing I didn't. What I do know is I became a believer in the power of a good plan.
My next goal was a half marathon, the following fall. I found a 13-week training plan and I followed it faithfully. That's different than exactly. I did my best to do the prescribed workouts, but I'm sure I didn't do them all, nor did I hit all the goals. But it worked. I completed my first half marathon.

For someone with no self-discipline and an aversion to plans, this was like a miracle. But I learned that a good plan greatly reduced the amount of willpower required to work toward my goals. I also learned that a good plan gave me motivation. As I noted before, there was power and small wins. There is a flywheel effect to incremental progress. A plan not only increases your likelihood of putting in the daily effort, but the progress that you make along the way will also be a huge source of motivation. There is a positive feedback loop that multiplies motivation.

An important way to keep that motivation going is to manage your environment. The impact of your environment is much greater than you might imagine. In 1971, United States government officials estimated 15% of active soldiers in Vietnam were heroin addicts. The government braced for a huge problem when they returned home. However, once they were out of that environment in Vietnam, the problem all but disappeared without intervention. Psychologists believe the primary reason was environment. Returning soldiers did not face the combination of boredom and fear that they faced in Vietnam, nor was the drug as readily available.

Think about how your environment influences your decision-making. If you're trying to cut back on refined sugar, do you want to have Twinkies and HoHo's in the house? If you're trying to exercise do you want to haul out a treadmill every morning or would it be easier if it were already set up?
You get the point. Doepker writes in The Healthy Habit Revolution, "If you have limited willpower, that willpower is best invested in setting up a positive environment rather than wasted on having to fight against a poor environment."

When you begin your plan, you won't necessarily know which environmental factors will be positive and which will be negative. That's what makes this principle so important. You can manage your environment to reduce or eliminate negative influences and to emphasize positive influences.
For example, if you're trying to lose weight, get rid of all the junk food in your house. This will make it harder for you to consume extra calories. You can't eat the ice cream in the freezer if it's not there. If you're going to eat all your meals on salad plates to reduce portion sizes, then put your dinner plates in a box and store them in the basement. They will still be there when you have guests over, but it will be much harder to use them for your regular meals.

Managing your environment does three things for you. First, it manages friction to your advantage. Reducing friction makes it easier to do what you plan to do. If you stuff your refrigerator full of healthy food, it makes it easier to eat healthy. Conversely, increasing friction can help you prevent what you don't want to do. Storing your dinner plates in a box in the basement will have that effect.

Second, managing your environment helps you to reduce distractions so you can focus on your plan. If you're trying to write 500 words a day, then close all the programs on your laptop, except your word processor. How easy is it to get distracted when you keep getting Facebook notifications, YouTube is staring you in the face or your email client is open so you can see every email that comes in? If you're planning to meditate, will it work better if you are in a busy place where you're likely to be interrupted or if you choose a secluded spot? These things may seem obvious, but a little time spent thinking through how you can minimize distractions and improve focus will make a huge difference.

Third, managing your environment can encourage consistency. Just like hanging out with the wrong people in the wrong places can encourage harmful behaviors, managing your environment can encourage positive behaviors. Over time, these positive behaviors will become habits that result in consistent effort. When I started blogging, I found an old writing desk and put it in the corner of a spare room in our house. As I mentioned, my goal was to spend 30 minutes each morning working on my blog before I went to work.

My routine was to sit down at the desk as soon as I finished my prayer time. After a few months (ten weeks probably) sitting down at the desk was like a signal in my head to get to work. It still is. This is how habits are developed.

Now, today's episode is really just a brief synopsis of this book. And again, it is available to you for free. I want you to have it so you can work on the one thing that's most important to you to start off 2021. That will be different for each of you, but everybody's going to have something.
That's it for episode 207.

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Remember, you can get a free copy of one new habit, one big goal change your life in ten weeks by going to the show notes and clicking on the link. As I said, I don't even collect an email address. I just hope you will find it helpful as you go into 2023. I will be back next week with an all new episode. In the meantime, you can find more information at thenonanxiousleader.com and you can email me at jack@christian-leaders.com until next time. Thanks and goodbye.