Chris Mance II - Mental Skills Coach

Bad habits are the result of not having a plan to make it easier to use discipline, self-control, and willpower. Therefore, the only way to break a bad habit is to follow a plan to turn it into a good habit.

In the beginning, creating and following a plan like this seems impossible. Bad habits are habits for a reason. They are hard to break. However, if you can buy-in to a concept summed up by this simple little quote below, you can accomplish this goal.

Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.

Saint Francis Assisi

To do this, it takes a 7-step process:

1. Become self-aware about the #1 bad habit holding you back from being the best version of yourself. You may have more than one bad habit, but only attack one at a time.
2. Define a goal to establish a very specific good habit to replace that bad habit with.
3. Create a daily routine for establishing that good habit, tracking your consistency (streaks), and measuring your improvement.
4. Persist as long as possible until you have one or more bad days that causes you to fail at keeping your routine.
5. Mark how long you were able to maintain your routine streak. If you set a new personal record for how long you maintained your routine streak, track it, and celebrate your victory.
6. Reflect on what caused the bad day(s), but don’t let it discourage you from starting a new streak immediately.
7. Make adjustments and start doing it every day again and then repeat from step 4.

Turning Bad Habits into Good Habits Is Not About Perfection

As you can see, committing to this 7-step plan does not mean you are committing to be perfect. Thinking that you must be perfect is what will deter you from starting or will cause you to quit if you fall back to your bad habits for a few days.

The fact is perfection is impossible. Everyone has bad days. This is why having this 7-step plan is so important. When you do have a few bad days, this 7-step plan allows you to fall back on a process that will keep you from the debilitating spiral that leads to giving up completely.

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.

Subsequently, understanding and accepting imperfection is a must to turn bad habits into good habits. Simply stated, to build good habits you must focus more on the process of building good habits and focus less on your bad habits.