FOWLER: Climbing your walls to a long, fulfilling life
Curt Fowler
“Champions don’t do extraordinary things. They do ordinary things, but they do them without thinking, too fast for the other team to react. They follow the habits they have learned.” – Charles Duhigg
I am currently reveling in Georgia’s win over Alabama for the National Championship. As I write this article on overcoming obstacles to a long and fulfilling life, I am reflecting on the obstacles UGA’s football team overcame to defeat Nick Saban and the Tide.
I stayed up even later to watch the interviews after the game. You know the word that was repeated more than any other when coaches and players tried to explain their success – PRACTICE.
Champions play at the level they practice. The Dawgs were not focused on finding a way to beat Alabama last night, they were focused on doing what they were trained to do. They had practiced what to do for so long, that all they focused on was doing what they had practiced. The goal was not to win, it was to execute just like you did at practice hundreds of times before.
What areas of our lives could we change with practice? We can change any area we want in our life but not all at once. Change takes focus.
We all know that change is difficult, and as someone who has failed year after year on many of my goals, I can testify that change is hard. Bad habits are hard to break.
But bad habits are breakable. Better outcomes are possible. All we have to do is practice doing the right thing and never, ever quit practicing until we get the outcomes we desire. And watch your wording. You are not failing, you are practicing. Every time you practice and fail you are getting closer to your desired outcome.
“I have not failed 700 times, I have succeeded in proving those 700 ways do not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.” – Thomas Edison (on inventing)
Here is the system I have found most helpful to create the outcomes in my life that I desire.
1. Pick A Keystone Life Area: What is a keystone in your life? A keystone life area is an area, that if improved, would have cascading positive impacts on other areas of your life.
Maybe your finances are a wreck and that is causing you untold amounts of stress and anxiety. This stress is negatively affecting your health and your relationships with the people you love the most.
Making a positive change in your finances would reduce your stress, improve your health and your relationships. Positive change in your finances would have a cascading positive impact on many areas of your life.
Health, relationships, work could all be a keystone area for you. Pick your No. 1.
2. Brainstorm Positive Improvements: There are a lot of daily actions you could do to help with your finances – pack your lunch, do a budget, save for retirement. Same goes for health or any other area.
Do a brain dump on all the positive change ideas for your chosen area. Focus on your No. 1 keystone area. Ask friends to pitch in ideas. The most implementable ideas are small changes that you can work on daily or weekly (Ex: do one pushup, save $5, read 1 page of a book before bed).
Take a blank sheet of paper and draw a cross from top to bottom and left to right. On the left-hand axis write “Hard,” on the right side write “Easy.” This axis measures the difficulty of your ideas for improvement.
At the top axis write “High Impact,” at the bottom write “Low-Impact.” Now put each of your improvement ideas on the chart according to their impact and difficulty level.
Check out the ideas in the top right quadrant. These are ideas that are easier for you to do and have the highest impact on your desired outcomes.
3. Implement A Change: Grab one of your ideas in the top right quadrant that you can get excited about. This is the new habit you are going to create that will lead to positive outcomes in your keystone life area.
In the words of B.J. Fogg, your goal is to create a “habit recipe” to make this new habit a part of your life. A habit recipe consists of three things:
– Anchor: Something you do just before the action you want to take.
– Tiny Behavior: The smallest version of the positive habit you can do.
– Celebration: Something to create a positive feeling when you do the behavior.
Let’s say you want to get in better shape and have pushups as one of the ideas in your top right quadrant. The tiny behavior is one pushup – just one. You might want to find anchors in the morning and evening.
Your anchors could be “as soon as my feet hit the floor” and “when I set my watch on the dresser before going to bed.” Your celebration could be anything that makes you smile – raise your hands in the air, play the Rocky theme in your head and do a little “Rocky Dance,” whatever brings some joy into your life.
Now, grab a friend to hold you accountable and find a highly visible place to mark down your progress daily. Marks on a calendar work great.
On the first day you do your new habit write down +1. If you do it again the next day, write down +2. Add 1 to your score every day you do the habit and subtract 1 every day you miss it (you can adjust this for weekly goals as well). You know you are building a habit when your score is growing.
4. Check Your Progress: When your score gets in the 30+ range, check your outcomes. Do you need to make your habit a little harder or stack another habit on top of it to get the outcomes you want? If your outcomes are great – congratulations! Is there another keystone life area you’d like to work on?
Is your score not growing? Check your habit recipe – are there changes you could make? Could you make the habit smaller? Grab your accountability partner and discuss it with them. Our friends usually see things we cannot. Reset and try again.
If you continue to struggle with making this action a habit, go back to your habit grid and find another action in your top right quadrant and try it.
The key is to not quit. Developing discipline is a lifestyle and takes a lifetime. There is no end but there are always things to celebrate on the way!
A healthy and fulfilling life is within reach for all of us. We can’t determine how long we’ll live but how we choose to live can improve our odds of a long life and can make all of our days more fulfilling.
If you’d like to dig into this more Google B.J. Fogg and Tiny Habits. He has a lot of great resources online. If you’d like a Google sheets habit tracker with sample habit recipes, drop me an email at curt@valuesdrivenresults.com with “Habit Tracker” in the subject line and I’ll send you a link directly.
“Are your habits today leading you to the outcomes you desire? If not, you have the power and the responsibility to change them.”
Curt Fowler is president of Fowler & Company and director at Fowler, Holley, Rambo & Stalvey. He is dedicated to helping leaders build great organizations and better lives for themselves and the people they lead.
Curt is a syndicated business writer, speaker and business coach. He has an MBA in strategy and entrepreneurship from the Kellogg School, is a CPA and a pretty good guy as defined by his wife and five children.
