Book Review
Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones, Penguin, London, (2018)
Following a workshop on Healthy Habits I started pondering the way that habits influence who we are and can help to provide structures and controls to enhance a person’s potential and capacity. According to researchers at Duke University, habits account for about 40 percent of our behaviours on any given day[1].
In Atomic Habits, James Clear describes how understanding how to build new habits (and how your current one’s work) is essential for making progress in your health, your happiness, and your life in general.
He starts by defining habits as the small decisions you make and actions you perform every day: “a behaviour that has been repeated enough times to become automatic”. Much of the time these are sub-conscious but seizing control of these rituals can help to shape your identity and free up cognitive load to focus on more meaningful or complex challenges. Rather than restricting freedom, they create space to think more creatively and strategically.
This theory appealed since working with start-up companies, the operational load they bear is significant and the risk of burnout is high. When I have talked to certain founders about coaching and its merits, the biggest bottleneck to initiating an engagement is time and capacity. If coaching could include elements of automating certain cognitive processes that could have the effect of freeing up ‘Time to Think’.
Clear tells us that actions that produce positive consequences are more likely to be repeated and those that produce unpleasant outcomes more likely to be avoided. Understanding the feedback loop is the key to unwinding negative habits and integrating positive ones. By mapping out unhealthy habits using the below framework we can raise awareness of how they start and how unrewarding and unhelpful they were.
Queue => Craving => Response => Reward
Since behaviour change is all about sizing up reward value, the only way to change a negative habit is to ensure the pain point (craving) is acute enough and the prize (reward) attractive enough.
To build better habits he suggests adopting 4 laws: make them obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying with the inverse true if trying to ditch a habit: make them invisible, unattractive, difficult and unsatisfying.
To crudely summarise some of his other chapters, he suggests:
1) Start with an incredibly small habit — make it achievable, obvious and easy to adopt. Since willpower is inconstant, you should pick something that is easy enough that you don’t require motivation to do it.
Success is a few simple disciplines, practiced every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day.
— Jim Rohn
2) Increase your habit in small ways — One percent improvements add up quickly (as do one percent declines). By starting small and gradually increasing willpower and motivation increases which makes it easier to stick to your habit.
3) Map where you go off track — rather than trying to be perfect, abandon your all or nothing mentality and plan for failure — what are the likely things that will get in your way and how can you prevent them from doing so?
While this book was not one of the ones prescribed on our course, I anticipate applying the framework in my coaching sessions to help clients better understand their triggers, behaviours and results. With many of our portfolio companies seeking to disrupt incumbent industries it may also be a useful framework to share with leaders who are seeking to change or influence the habits of customers, employees or broader stakeholders.
[1] Habits: A Repeat Performance by David T. Neal, Wendy Wood, and Jeffrey M. Quinn
