Leverage Motivation to Build Up Consistency and Form Habits
In my last video, I explained how habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. Namely, when we consistently apply ourselves to practice and improve, we can achieve exponential results, as we compound expertise and mastery.
Nonetheless, it can be pretty difficult to be consistent, especially at the beginning, when the habit is not fully formed yet. In order to imprint this new pattern and make it effortless, we might first need to rely on motivation.
The issue being that motivation tends to fade away. So how can we keep motivation up?
There is a way to trick our minds while the habit is still forming, which allows us to sustain motivation. We need to create a “reward” and we can do so with progression or constant improvement.
When we see ourselves progressing, improving regularly, it creates a positive feeling (sort of reward) and boosts our ego. Consequently, if we want to keep motivation up, we simply have to ensure we challenge ourselves to do a bit more than we did before.
When we do better than yesterday, during our sports practice or other activities, we can obviously observe that we improve and we can foresee that tomorrow we could even be better, which is a positive way to sustain motivation.
It can be hard to improve every day, thus we only need to do “small steps”, tiny incremental changes so this is enough to notice progress and not too hard to make us fail the task (which would shatter our motivation and progression).
More about Habits Management
If you want to know more about Habits, you can have a look at my article “Old Habits Die Hard, Learn to Kill the Bad Ones”
I also recommend reading ” Atomic Habits” by James Clear, which perfectly explains how small improvements can completely change one’s life.
Small improvements might often be seen as meaningless even if you logically know they are the correct thing to do and will set you up for success. What is the most important is to keep stacking them up gradually so you build-up momentum and ultimately harvest large benefits effortlessly.
The book is full of ideas, ways to implement good habits and get rid of the bad ones, all describe and explain in a cohesive, and easy to read manner.
A piece of advice I really like from “Atomic Habit” is the “Two-Minute Rule”, where if you try to implement a new habit, it should take you less than 2 minutes to execute, otherwise, you will struggle to implement it as it might at first require too much motivation or willpower.
To learn more about this book: “Atomic Habits – An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones” by James Clear, use this link: https://amzn.to/3eucURL
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