PRINCIPLE 1 - HABIT SETTING VS. GOAL SETTING​​​​
“Goal-setting” is often promoted as the best strategy to achieve the results and type of life that you want. While having goals is important and a good idea, simply writing them down and relying on motivation and willpower to help you take the necessary actions to achieve them is not a fail-proof strategy.
As the actions you consistently take produce your results, a smarter strategy is to focus on developing positive daily and weekly HABITS related to these goals. We call this habit-setting.
Unlike traditional goal setting, which focuses on a specific outcome or result to achieve at some time in the future, habit-setting focuses on determining what consistent behaviors or habits we can adopt to propel us forward towards our goals and then working daily to lock these actions into our daily automatic behavior patterns. Over time, and with consistency, the positive habits we set will ultimately combine and compound to produce the “goals” or “end results” we want.
For example, if weight loss is a goal, it’s important to understand that the focus during this process should be on making changes (or creating daily actions / habits) that allow weight loss to occur – NOT numbers on a scale. Without clearly defined daily habits to follow, you may or may not achieve your weight loss goal.
BENEFITS OF HABIT-SETTING
Unlike goals, which have an expiration date, habits become a way of life. They can be modified and improved, but they don’t have an end date. When we focus on goal setting, we are saying that achievement is some result at some date in the future, which we may or may not reach.
But when we shift our attention to habit-setting, instead of goal setting, every day that we perform our habit means that we are achieving our goals that day, and in this way, we feel a real sense of achievement and progress.
As the habits we set eventually become automatic and ingrained into our daily and weekly routines, we won’t need to rely on the constant willpower and choices about our behavior that solely focusing on achieving goals requires.
HABIT CHANGE SUCCESS STRATEGIES
We commonly fail at making positive behavioral changes in our lives because we rely on willpower to stick to positive habits or to resist negative ones. As willpower has been scientifically proven to be finite and fragile, we cannot confidently rely on it. We can also fail when we leave “the doing of good habits” up to memory. If we rely solely on memory to do something every day, it’s going to be difficult, and the chances are we’ll forget. The good news is we can dramatically increase our ability to adopt positive habits and replace negative habits by using some "Habit Change Success Strategies".
As you'll soon learn, a key principle of the Program is to “Walk Before You Run”. In other words, when picking new habits to implement, choose small habits you can easily stick to long enough to ingrain before you make them more complex. The daily actions you choose for each habit may seem insignificant to you at first. You may feel that you need to do so much more, or that you can do more. This may be true. But remember, the key reason people fail at introducing positive habits is that they try to introduce behavior changes that are too big to begin with. Don’t let that be you.