Chris Mance II - Mental Skills Coach

Yesterday I explained the difference between habits and routines. Chiefly, habits are instinctive and addictive while routines require discipline, self-control, and willpower. This is important to be self-aware about because good habits are powerful multipliers that make pursuing your goals easier. On the other hand, bad habits will cause a debilitating spiral of self-inflicted wounds.

Moreover, bad habits start when you don’t have good routines. In other words, being impulsive is the only choice you have when you don’t have a plan to follow. Therefore, the cure to bad habits is to plan out a routine that replaces it with a good habit.

However, planning out a routine does not mean you are committing to be perfect. Thinking that you must be perfect and have a strict routine is what will deter you from starting or will cause you to quit when you get off track with your routine for a few days.

The fact is perfection is impossible. Everyone has bad days and gets off track with their routines. This is why routines are so important. When you do have a few bad days or get off track, having a routine to fall back on is what saves you from the debilitating spiral.

So, before you can eliminate a bad habit you must first eliminate the misconception that people who have good habits never have bad days. Even the people you admire most fail sometimes at using their discipline, self-control, and willpower to fight against bad habits. Understanding and accepting this fact is the first step to building good habits.

Building good habits is all about your process of trying to build good habits and not letting failure discourage you. This is what a routine does. Routines have streaks, and streaks end. Instead of focusing on maintaining the perfect routine, those who have good habits focus on increasing the length of the routine streak. This means one or more bad days does not discourage you from continuing onward with starting a new routine streak.

In a word, this is persistence. Persistence is the key to having good habits and breaking bad habits not perfection.

1. Define a goal to establish a good habit
2. Create a daily routine for establishing that habit, tracking your consistency (streaks), and measuring your improvement.
3. Persist as long as possible until you have one or more bad days that causes you to fail at keeping your routine.
4. Mark how long you were able to maintain your routine streak. Reflect on what caused the bad day(s), but don’t let it discourage you from starting a new streak immediately.
5. Make adjustments and start doing it every day again and then repeat from step 3.