How to Effectively Form & Sustain New Habits

 Part 2 - New Years resolution imageHave you ever tried to form or change a habit? How many times have you set New Year’s goals to make a change (exercise, eat healthy, etc.), but within a couple of months into the New Year, slipped back into your old habits. If you are like most people you did–and probably will relapse back to your old habits within six months (Norcross, Mrykalo & Blagys, 2002).

In a previous Blog post, we introduced a new Enlighten, Encourage and Enable individual behavior change model as a way to facilitate the process of successful behavioural change. Let’s explore some of the challenges and methods for forming new habits (that is specifically highlighted within the Enable section of the 3E Model about facilitating behavioural change).

Part 2 - Enlighten, enable, encourage (1)

So, how do we help clients become effective in actually acquiring new habits and making them automatic?

Ingredients for Learning a New Behaviour

There is, in fact, a big difference between “experts” and those “who are expert” in what they do. Research by K. Anders Ericcson and colleagues (Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Römer, 1993) conclude that great performance comes mostly from two things:

In an analysis of diaries of 24 elite figure skaters to determine what might explain some of their performance success.  They found that the best skaters spent 68% of their practice doing really hard jumps and routines compared to those who were less successful (they spent about 48% of their time doing the same difficult things).

Having raw talent is wonderful but it’s what you do with it that really seems to matter.  “Only dead fish go with the flow” is an old saying–if you don’t work to get better it just doesn’t happen naturally.  Ericsson and others use the word “deliberate practice” to mean focused, structured, serious and detailed attempts to get better.  That means it has to be challenging and difficult (i.e., practicing the most difficult tasks).

How The Best of the Best Get Better

Graham Jones in his 2008 HBR article “How the Best of the Best Get Better and Better” outlines four unique characteristics of top performers.  These themes can be summarised as:

How Long Does it Take for New Habits to Form?

Research by Phillippa Lally and colleagues from the UK suggest that new behaviours can become automatic, on average, between 18 to 254 days but it depends on the complexity of what new behaviour you are trying to put into place and your personality.

They studied volunteers who chose to change an eating, drinking or exercise behaviour and tracked them for success. They completed a self-report diary which they entered on a website log and were asked to try the new behavior each day for 84 days. For the habits, 27 chose an eating behaviour, 31 a drinking behaviour (e.g., drinking water), 34 an exercise behaviour and 4 did something else (e.g., meditation).

Analysis of all of these behaviours indicated that it took 66 days, on average, for this new behaviour to become automatic and a new “habit” that seemed pretty natural. The mean number of days varied by the complexity of the habit:

Although there are a lot of limitations in this study, it does suggest that it can take a large number of repetitions for new behaviours to become a habit. Therefore, creating new habits requires tremendous self-control to be maintained for a significant period of time before they become more “automatic” and performed without any real self-control.

For most people, it takes about 3 months of constant practice before a more complicated new behaviour gets “set” in our neural pathways as something we are comfortable with and seemingly automatic. So, adopting a new physical workout routine or learning to become more participative as a leader might take quite a while with or without coaching to truly become more natural (i.e., about 90 days).

Want Help to Facilitate Successful Behavior Change in Clients?

Our new book Clueless: Coaching People Who Just Don’t Get It is based on a new three stage individual behavior change model (as we mentioned in our last blog, Clueless Part 1). We also talk about some of the ways to form new habits and prevent relapse.

In addition, we have developed 96free coaching exercises to help your clients translate awareness from coaching and feedback into deliberate practice. Over time, these new behaviours become automatic requiring less cognitive load (concentration) and rehearsal (i.e., the reason we can drive without much effort now leaving us tempted to do things we shouldn’t such as speaking on the phone with others).

About the author: Kenneth Nowack, Ph.D. is a licensed psychologist (PSY13758) and President & Chief Research Officer/Co-Founder of Envisia Learning www.envisialearning.com, is a member of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations, and is a guest lecturer at the UCLA Anderson School of Management.  Ken also serves as Associate Editor of Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research.  His recent book Clueless: Coaching People Who Just Don’t Get It is available at http://www.envisialearning.com/clueless_book

Kenneth Nowack will be giving a free seminar on ‘Clueless: Coaching people to change behaviour’ at the World of Learning Exhibition at 14:45 – 15:15 at Tuesday 30 September 2014. Register free for the exhibition here >>

 

References

Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. Th., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100, 363-406.

Jones, G. (2008).  How the best of the best get better and better.  Harvard Business Review, 86, 123-127.

Lally, P., Van Jaarsveld, C., Potts, H. & Wardle, J. (2009). How are habits formed: Modeling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 1009, 998-1009.

Norcross, J., Mrykalo, S., & Blagys, M. (2002). Auld Lang Syne: Success predictors, change processes, and self-reported outcomes of New Year’s resolvers and nonresolvers. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 58, 397-405.