How to Make New Habits Stick

Hi there, I'm Ben Morton and welcome to another episode of the Leaders Kit Bag. It's the weekly micro edition of my podcast. Each episode is just six minutes long and is designed to provide you with tips, tools and tactics around specific aspects of leadership and management. It addresses some of the most common challenges you will face as a leader or manager. They are all recorded unscripted whilst I'm out walking in the countryside. So you'll probably hear birds tweeting in the background or just ambient noise as the people around me are going about their day to day life. That's all I'm going to say by way of an introduction, so let's dive straight in to this week's episode. If you're starting the new year determined.

To make some changes or create new habits and routines, then today's episode of the Leader's Kit Bag is for you. I don't know if you've ever noticed how we humans tend to have Teflon for the good habits. They just don't stick.

Yet at the very same time we've.

Got Velcro for the bad ones. They stick really easily. Well, in today's episode I've got four tips to help make your new healthy habits stick. So how do we make the good habits stick?

To do this, I just need you.

To remember the acronym FEED F E A D. It should be simple to remember because you just need to think about feedback feeding your new habits. Let's take a classic New Year's resolution of getting fitter and healthier to help us explore the FEED acronym. The F stands for force. This is simply about thinking about how we can force the new habit or routine into being. For example, if we're trying to get fitter and healthier, we may decide to lay our workout clothes out before we go to bed so they're there ready to go to give us that cue to exercise in the morning. Or we might decide to work out with a friend or a personal trainer, thereby forcing ourselves to do it because we've got that accountability part partner there. The E is eliminate. This is really about trying to remove all of the blockers, hurdles, distractions or temptations that might prevent us from starting to build our new habit. Again, with our example of getting healthier and fitter, we might decide to keep our phone and out of the bedroom or out of sight so we don't get drawn to it as soon as we wake up in the morning. If that's when we're planning to exercise, or if you're in the gym we might decide to keep our phone in the locker in the changing room so we don't get distracted between exercises or sets, and we can stay fully focused on what it is that we're doing. The A stands for automate or automation. This is simply about trying to put mechanisms into our schedule or into our life. That means it's easy to create the new habit or to start doing the new action that we want to take. For example, you may decide that you want to sign up to some sort of fitness app or subscribe to to a class. Therefore, starting to make exercising more automatic for me personally, right now I'm training for a series of ultra marathons. So I've created a training program on my Garmin here, and each day it tells me what my workout is, how long for, when to rest, and it gives a little beep each morning telling me what my session is for that day. It's all automating my training. And then finally, the D stands for delegate or delegation. This is really about enrolling others and getting them to help, holding us to account. An example of delegation might be you hire a personal trainer to train you and then you've got that degree of accountability. I once heard a story of a senior leader who was trying to create a new habit of leaving work slightly earlier to get home to see their partner and children. And because they were typically the last one in the office, they automated the light to turn off at a set time. And that was his trigger to go home. That's an example that probably spans automation and delegation. So there you have it, folks. Four simple tactics to help you embed new habits and routines in this new year. Force, eliminate, automate, and delegate. As always, I hope it's been useful. Look after yourself, look after those. You've got the privilege and responsibility to lead. And until next time, lead on.