How Your Habits Determine Your Chances Of Success

The stats are scary. We all have goals, and yet 78% of the time those goals don’t lead to a change in behaviour, which means they can’t be realised. The science is clear. If you want to achieve your dreams, you need to start by changing your habits.

- Rob Jardine

We live in a time where people are preparing for life on Mars and are actively engaging with robots in the workplace. Yet, when we consider new habits and selfmastery, it doesn’t seem that we have conquered that frontier yet. The self-help book industry alone in 2008 was valued at $11 billion. Even though we have goals or intention-plans to achieve these goals, some studies prove that having an intention to act and actually acting is only correlated by 28% in actual behaviour change.

THE INTENTION/ACTING GAP

Most of us can clearly understand that good habits are better than bad habits and yet there is still a clear gap between intention-to-act and action.

There are a number of techniques for new habit formation that focus on setting, context, barriers to action, social influence, emotion and purpose but these should be unpacked on a case by case basis and do not always provide a wide spread approach that many people can make use of. However, breakthroughs in our understanding of how we actively form new habits in the brain have assisted in the development of new behaviour and habits that last.

To understand these we first need to understand the dynamics of a habit.

THE SCIENCE BEHIND HABITS

A habit is an automatic behavioural pattern in response to a cue. It’s the result of repeating a behaviour in the same context again and again. It happens when we buckle up our seat belts when we get in a car, jump onto Facebook when we are feeling bored, or remember to take a notebook with to a meeting.