I often ask:

What would success look like if it were easy?

Lose 10 pounds with this one simple trick! Spend 4 hours on this and earn an extra $15,000 per month! The 5 foods that incinerate belly fat!  

These types of clickbait headlines are so common and for good reason. We all inherently know these don’t work. But we’re intrigued none-the-less. What if? Is it possible? Couldn’t hurt to just check it out. Yet, we already know, if it were easy, everyone would already be doing it. If it were easy, we’d all be billionaires with six-pack abs.

Many clickbait headlines often sell or promote a drug, a supplement, or a hack. But deep down we know that’s not the ticket. While some of these tricks may work in the short-term (most don’t), they rarely ever provide long-term success/benefit and result in the all-too-common rebound effect. Like a Yo-Yo we try the hack, lose some weight, fall back into old habits and routines, gain some weight, try a new hack, lose some weight, and so on.

As a health coach, one of the most important things I focus on with my clients is developing healthy habits and routines. While short-term success is an important component of our work together, the true benefit is developing shifts to your habits, routines, and identity that provide lasting success long after we’re done working together. 

Habits, as defined by Charles Duhigg in his book The Power of Habits, are actions that we perform repeatedly and automatically, often without even thinking about them. (For those wondering, the answer to the question at the top of the page is “habits”). Duhigg discusses the process of habit formation as the “habit loop,” which consists of a cue, a routine, and a reward.

Breaking Bad…Habits 

Not all habits are good. In fact, it is often the bad habits we’ve developed over the years that have us in a position seeking some sort of change. We can leverage our knowledge of the cue-routine-reward habit loop to not only help us to develop healthy habits, but to also to help us break bad habits. Duhigg discusses one strategy as one we’ve identified the cue and reward, replace the routine with a new one. For example, if you want to break the habit of snacking on junk food in the evening, you can replace it with the habit of going for a walk.

Stanford behavior scientist, BJ Fogg believes that there are three ways to change behavior: have an epiphany, change your environment, or to make continual progress through tiny changes to habits over time. I’m a darn good coach, and when all the stars have aligned, I’ve helped clients to have epiphanies, but that’s a rare enough experience that I don’t view epiphany as a reliable strategy for our work together. When it happens, it’s a beautiful thing, but our focus will be largely on the other two.

Changing your environment is an incredibly powerful tool, and one of my favorites for breaking bad habits. Remember the habit loop? It all starts with the cue and if the cue never occurs, neither will the habit. Changing your environment can be a strong force towards eliminating unwanted cues. For example, you might have a routine where you plop down on the couch after a long day, reach for the remote, and start watching TV. If you’re binging Ted Lasso again now for the 4th time have at it...just kidding…sort of (big fan of that show). But what if you want to spend less time watching shows? Change your environment. Have a spouse or roommate hide your remote and replace it with a book, puzzle, game, etc. You may still plop down on the couch, but now when you reach for the remote, it won’t be there. I think my TV has a physical power button, but I’ve yet to find it, so no remote, no TV.

Designing Good Habits

The dirty truth is that habits will form whether we want them to or not, so it is important to be mindful and intentional around our actions. With the right steps you can design the habits you want to have. In his brilliant book Tiny Habits, BJ Fogg emphasizes the importance of starting small when developing new habits (I loved this book so much, I signed up for classes through Fogg and became a Certified Tiny Habits Coach). He suggests that by making a small, simple change, we can build momentum and make it easier to tackle larger changes later on.

Not only is there strong science to back this up, but I see this being the case with client after client and it makes intuitive sense. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Get into a routine, develop a habit, and continue to build on that when you’re ready. It’s not sexy. It’s not a “get rich quick scheme” or “magic pill” that instantly makes your dreams come true. Your short-term wins are unlikely to impress strangers on the ‘Gram. But when you continue to take steps in the right direction, the long-term impact of tiny habits is absolutely astounding. You ever see one of those graphs showing the effects of compounding interest? This works the same way.

Many of my clients come to me looking for motivation. In my experience, the greatest motivator is progress. We have a goal. We make some progress. We feel good and want to keep going. We make more progress. It is precisely this shift, this type of growth in clients that keeps me so excited for this work. But if progress = motivation, it’s a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg-situation: it’s hard to increase motivation without progress and hard to get started towards making progress without motivation. Going tiny helps with that.

I do know this, you can’t make progress until you start. Let’s get started together!