Habits. Starting Smaller Than You Think
Sprout Sweater Episode 11 : Using the power of sprout-sized habits to bring about significant change
Join Dave Algeo aboard "Sprout 1" and take another journey into your inner world where mind, meaning and metaphor collide.
This episode Dave shares how habits are not only a critical key to success but that size does matter - the smaller the better. Learn how to start forming sprout-sized habits in a bid to develop lasting significant change.
Dave Algeo is a writer, coach, trainer and speaker empowering others to live big, by identifying the small but significant things that can transform the life we are living. Join Dave on the good ship 'Sprout1' as we explore the inner galaxy of the human mind, and find the sprouts that make the biggest difference. These are the sprouts you are looking for.
Search for 'Sprout Sweater' in your favourite podcast feed. To find out more about the podcast, and episode show notes at Podcast — Stress(ed) Guru and more about his in person and online events at www.stressedguru.com. Drop Dave a line at dave@sproutsweater.com to ask questions, offer feedback or suggestions for future podcast content.
Episode 11 Show Notes
The following is a rough draft of the content (not a full transcript - more notes forming the basis of the podcast recording
I was only too aware that I drank more alcohol than was healthy.
Welcome aboard sprout1 I’m your host Dave Algeo chief sprout sweater. Strap in and ready yourself for another show journey into our inner world where we explore strange new planets of behaviour change and the power of the small sprout sized actions.
Its Episode 11 Habits. Starting smaller than you think.
And as we lift of the pad and before we get into the episode don’t forget if you find that the demands of life and the meaning of it all is leading you to sleepless nights, tossing and turning with deep and not so deep questions rattling around your head then hop over to sproutsweater.com and sign up for my sleep checklist and soon to be released free Operation Snooze Sleep Improvement program. Start getting your head back and your shit together so that you can start getting life back on your terms, sproutsweater.com.
I hope you were able to make last week's journey where we delved into the world of goals and how we can make use of them more effectively to frame our lives and give us a direction of travel. This week I want to explore how habits can be a powerful key to getting us moving and keeping us on track as we move in the direction of our life vision. Why a habit? Well habits form a foundation of a vast majority of our behaviour. In a future episode I’m speaking with Dr Simon Raybould and we explore how the mind relies on schema and scripts to run our day-to-day behaviour without relying on our conscious mind which let’s face it has enough to do doesn’t it. Watch out for episode 12 for that one but for now let’s park the more technical terms like schema and scripts and consider why if you are seeking to achieve a particular goal such as running a 10k or losing a bit of weight or pursuing a promotion ambition, habits are the key to success. I don’t know about you but I was probably more aware of my habits in life because of my bad habits. The ones that I routinely found myself engaging in rather than, you know having an abundance of the good ones. I was only too aware that I drank more alcohol than was healthy because of my habit of having to flop onto the couch after a busy day with a bottle of larger in hand. My regular visits to the fridge to establish what chocolate treat I would get to know intimately were clearly rooted in habit and don’t get me started on my biscuit consumption habit. Suffice to say that if anyone, usually me, brought a packet of Viennese Swirls in the house they really didn’t get an opportunity to cower in their packet for long before I put them out of their misery. To be fair I saw it as a bit of a kindest to be honest. But good habits, um, well that’s a different matter, brushing my teeth yeah OK fair enough but exercise, healthy eating, financial management. I was nothing I guess if not consistently inconsistent in my application of good practice. To be fair it’s a wonder that I am the way that I am and not heavier and that I’m still in business despite my best efforts. I’ve survived and I have to be thankful for that and I guess I have the regular inconsistent work to thank for something at least. But joking aside I would say that inconsistency was a sign of my whole or nothing approach to everything. As I mentioned before that mindset usually results in more nothing than all to be honest but when I went all in I committed and the results came. The trouble was it wasn’t consistent and it was sporadic. Now does that sound familiar and have you ever embarked on yet another fitness plan or diet or gone all in on preparation and planning perhaps even buy new plastic tubs to store all those slices and cucumber you bulk prepare every week. Or bought an entire new exercise kit or fancy piece of equipment only to find that you don’t sustain it. All well and good but the question is have you sustained it or as happens so often and has so many times in my own life have you maintained it with laser focus and even a good gargantuan effort for an impressively long period of time; pushing back the demands of your existing life like Moses parting and holding back the water only for it to crash back to its previous ways in a heartbeat. If that’s been you then I feel you, I do. It’s been a pattern based on the stories I’ve told myself about me and that I have bought into about success, you know that massive action, think big, no pain no gain etc. etc. I bought that for so much of my life. Its served me at times and I’m not totally knocking it. In fact it speaks volumes for our capacity as human beings for vision, motivation, drive, determination and sheer pig headedness to be honest. It speaks volumes about that in its strength that you have within you. If this is you, you are anything but weak, you are lacking in will power, you have masses of it. The trouble is we direct that potential in misguided ways. We deny reality and that’s the crucial point. We deny real life and the demands of life. I don’t know about you but if I didn’t have to make a living or be a parent, partner, family member, friend that methodology would probably serve me well. Maybe that’s why it worked in my younger days, you know the days when I had nothing but me to worry about. I didn’t have this thing called a real life sticking its sodding oar in and reminding me I had responsibilities.
But now I’m older and wiser. Well older anyway and I guess I’ve learned some things along the way. I’ve learned actually that making change that lasts rests in developing habits. Growing to the point of being able to run on their own then building on them. See habits are a bit like the life raft for our new way of living working towards that goal. The good news is we don’t even need a life raft yet. We need one of those floats, I don’t know if you remember from swimming lessons at school those little polystyrene floaty things that you used to have these to chuck in and it was just enough to keep your head above water and give you a chance to start kicking and moving and raise your confidence and allow you to develop those formative fledging skills. Incidentally, remember those bricks, those grey bricks that we had in swimming, you know, the ones you had to dive down and retrieve them as part of your bronze swimming level. Anyway, those bricks are a bit like the bad habits I guess except we hang onto them don’t we, we can’t let them go and they drag us back down. I’ll spend an episode or several on that topic breaking bad habits in the future but back to forming the good habits and the little floats. This brings me back to the title of the podcast - The Sprout Sweater. Over the years I’ve come to realise the power of the sprout. The small and not only cooking with the big stuff, you know slicing the cabbages down, chunking them into sprout sized chunks and then sweating those sprouts. I covered that in last week's episode but in starting to shift our behaviour towards something more positive.
There’s lots of research into the making and breaking habits and one aspect I’m particularly excited about is the power of the small or as B. J. Fogg puts it Tiny Habits. Indeed, he has a book with that title, check it out. It's really useful. What excites me is that as busy people, which most of us know no doubt are, we can actually divide out the behaviour from the habit. Now I’m not talking about separating the two totally, obviously they go together but recognizing that habit formation in itself is a distinct element of behaviour change. And one that can start and indeed thrive at the level of the small, at the level of the sprout. What do I mean? I guess an example might be useful so let’s say you wanna get more active in life. That's kind of the bigger vision if you like and the goal you have set yourself is to do a bunch of air squats. They’re a bit like air guitar in that you squat without carrying any weight other than your own body weight. Firstly, let’s assume you can’t even do one, it’s just something we can’t do. We have been inactive for long enough and getting down on our honkers, that's the full bend where your bum touches your ankles, is impossible, our mobility may be limited. So, in comes the power of the small. Rather than focusing on the goal, say to do 50 air squats in a row, that’s a bit of a leg burner if there ever was one. We focus on habit formation and in CrossFit terms we scale down the action to the smallest we can more comfortably do. So maybe one air squat where we can bend our legs to a little lower and maybe lower the body 5 inches or down to a chair or to the bed. That's where we could start. One. Nothing more, one sprout sized action. But when and how do we remember to do it and then how do we build on it. Here’s where B. J. Fox Tiny Habit methodology comes in. We need a motivation, a reason why. So that’s last week’s episode I covered that off around you know what’s the goal and how it fits in the vision of life and developing our why? why go for it this particular goal, why choose this particular goal. Then we need a prompt and this is the critical thing and the prompt can be a number of things but the best one is a pre-existing habitual activity. Something we already do daily and without thinking. So, let’s keep the example simple, maybe after putting down the toothbrush after brushing our teeth, then we have the action, the one-half squat. So, we have the motivation, the prompt and the action. What we need to do then is just rehearse it a few times to get more familiar with it and create a bit of a groove for the habit to be off running. So, we rehearse that, we...
Pick up the toothbrush, put it down and do the squat.
Pick up the toothbrush, put it down and do the squat.
Pick up the toothbrush, put it down and do the squat.
We repeat so that we start to get the habit formed at a basic level and then we are off to the races. Without forgetting one key ingredient I have to say and this is something that B. J. Fogg asserts that is crucial actually and often overlooked and undervalued, is to celebrate when we do complete the habit no matter how small we have a little celebration and that could be just a little silent YES! A fist pump or whatever. Something that does it for you. It could be very overstated or it could be really understated but celebrating builds that positive effect that links between the habit and the result and builds our motivation. So, what next, well we repeat. The next time you put down the toothbrush we repeat the action and celebrate and if you feel like it you can add another one and build up. But the key is to keep the goal i.e. the intention small - I will do one, at least one only. Here’s where I remind you that the behaviour and the habit formation can be kind of separated if you like. There will be some days where you may not feel like doing those five squats or you just haven’t got time. You may have built up to five squats and you just don’t have time or simply cannot be faffed. In that case the all or nothing thinkers of us may then fall off the habit wagon but not the sprout sweaters, not us sprout sweaters. Here’s where we make ourselves permission to sack off the behaviour for the day but ensure that failing all else we put a pin in the habit i.e., we honor the habit. In other words, we protect the habit by doing one squat only to whatever depth we see fit and then move on with the celebrations. One or two things may happen if we do that. We’ve put the pin in the habit and one or two things may happen. We may end up doing a few more squats after all but if not we have protected the habit. We have ensured it has its place in our day and it will be there to return to next time we brush our teeth and feel like doing more. The reality is keeping it small not only protects the habit but often leads to a real incremental improvement over time and can have a psychological boost too. It’s a new story we can tell ourselves that even though I don’t feel like doing xy and z I still did the habit and that’s the key part of it.
So as our craft sprout1 begins the landing process allowing you to return to your fellow humans here’s what I want you to do.
Identify one of your goals that you're either working on or want to focus on.
Pick a behaviour that if repeated regularly daily or several times a day it will move you towards that goal.
Shrink the behaviour down to the smallest sproutest size possible, something you don’t just feel you can do but you can feel you can more than comfortably do.
Identify a prompt, add it to an existing behaviour and tag it on the end there. Remember to rehearse it a few times so you get the groove there.
Identify a little celebration, a sprout sized positive emotional hit. What do you do, something like what you do when you get some good news or see your team score or because the Olympics are on at the moment see someone win a medal. You know you have little fist pumps, they’re permitted, they're allowed.
Rinse and repeat and build on the habit over time.
Give it a go and let me know what you choose at dave@sproutsweater.com I’d love to hear from you.
I hope you’ve enjoyed your flight aboard sprout1. For show notes and information on how to get the podcast feed direct to your apple podcast Spotify or other favourite podcast feed visit sproutsweater.com and touchdown!
Episode 12 Teaser:
Episode 12 is a 'Big Sweat' episode. This episode Dave interviews Dr SImon Raybould an expert in helping others have more impact through improving their presentations, pitches and talks and by raising their confidence levels. His research background leads him to provide the most robust and well researched tips, tools and approaches to improving our ability to change the world by having more impact.