Control your Habits to Decide your Path

Use Signals to Create Processes

Habit building is based on 4 steps:

The signal

The routine

The desire

The reward

And mastering how to make the most of each one of these elements is the best way to create habits that stick and can let us achieve our goals. The objective is to develop through margianl growth instead of doing it through radical growth that can’t be sustained (although the topic of whether we can sustain radical growth could be interesting for future articles).

Whenever we want to create a new habit the first step is the signal. It is the thing that makes us think of and remember the habit we have to do. This is why creating a good signal can make the whole process easier

If you are familiar with marketing, creating the signal is based on understand the user/customer. What they enjoy, what they do and their worries, and using all these in order to create something that makes them feel compelled to listen to your message.

Well, when trying to create habits and deciding on the signal, we have to follow a similar thinking process, but in this case you are the customer. So try to understand exactly why it is that you want to accomplish the goal.

Which are the reasons that are getting you out of your comfort zone in order to pursue it? Be sure to understand it with as much detail as possible. For example if you want to become a writer, then the goal can instead become something like I want to write a book

And from there you can take it to I want to write a book in 3 months, and you go over how many words books usually have. Once you know that you can see how many words you need to write everyday to hit that goal. Now that you know exactly what you would have to do every single day, the next step is to link it to a signal

The signal you use can be anything, from a physical object, to a place or a certain time. Just make sure that it is something that you can see every single day and that is easy to spot.

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