Lesson 1:

How Habits work

Hey there rebel,

Welcome to the first Better Creative Habits lesson! :)

I don’t want to waste any of your time, we’ll start right away, and I’ll keep everything brief and simple because we're all busy and overwhelmed with too much information and in some cases, too many courses. (You, too?)

Let’s start from the beginning...

Habits account for most of our time.

It’s just easier for your brain to go with what it already knows to do for most of your day, and only when it's really necessary/beneficial will it stop, evaluate, and take risks and get out of its comfort zone. And the only way to make progress is to launch your brain into this process yourself.

“You have to evaluate what’s working, what’s not, and make sure nothing’s holding you back from your creative goals.”

Now...

There are many questionable habits that we accidentally or intentionally develop that stand between where we are now and where we want to be ultimately:

Getting distracted easily
Putting it off until the last minute
Trying to make it "perfect"
Overthinking, overplanning, overcomplicating
Waiting for something/someone to give you permission
Not distinguishing between important and unimportant tasks
Starting new ideas before finishing old ones
Not asking anyone for feedback
Not asking for help when you need it
Allowing resistance to stop you from creating
Trying to control the creative process too much
Not putting yourself “out there”
Comparing your work with others’ work
Asking for feedback too early
Taking criticism personally

I bet you can relate to some of those, or even all, can’t ya?

We all know how frustrating it is to be doing something all the time and feel like you can’t get out of it. But listen--

Habits are easier to break out of than you think.

To understand how that works, let’s look at their structure.

A habit is a loop that goes between a Cue, a Routine, and a Reward. The same elements are also sometimes called trigger, response, and reward. Here's a visual representation of that process (called a "habit loop"):

The above illustration is from the book The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, who has studied how habits can be changed for individuals and corporations alike, and how to make them stick. After reading it I could never look at habits the same way again, and I never really felt stuck into one either.

The habit loop is a really simple process:

First you get the cue, which launches you into a specific behavior.
Next you respond by doing your routine, or what you always do when once you've been triggered by your cue.
Finally you get your reward, or the feeling of satisfaction at the end of your routine. And you get it every single time you do the routine. No wonder you don't want to stop doing what you always do!

Now, here's the thing...

Sometimes the cue is physical (like, your stomach growls, so you eat, or you do whatever you do to keep your diet), but most of the time the cue is an emotional trigger like boredom, overwhelm, or anxiety.

For example, you may feel overwhelmed by the approaching deadline for your book and your response is to engage in procrastination, which makes you distracted and therefore calm for a while. But as you know, it makes matters worse because the more you put something off, the more anxious you become. It's a vicious cycle, one that you need to break out of, eventually.

And here's where it gets interesting:

“To change a habit, all you need to do is to replace the middle part, your response to the cue.”

Just leave the cue and reward where they are, but change the routine.

That's good news because creating completely new habits is exhausting and most of the time it’s ineffective because you fall of the wagon since nothing really reminds you to do them. But when you already have a loop in action, you can simply utilize it to change your habit from “bad” to better.

For example…

You already have the habit of surfing Youtube when you get bored. And you don’t like it because you end up watching cat videos for hours. (You, too?) What if, instead of going to Youtube, you opened TED or grabbed your Kindle? You could end up getting a real rest or getting inspired and motivated, and that will improve not only your mood, but your creations as well.

Another one I've done lately is when I get that scratch to do something with my hands while I'm watching something on my computer, instead of reaching for sweets, I reach for a bottle of water. Eventually, you can't tell the difference.

Obviously, it takes time and effort to make sure the habit sticks, and we can’t just change all of our habits at once (when each habit takes 30 days to stick), but if you just start with one simple replacement of a really bad routine with a better one, that’s doable! You can do it today even!

Take action.

1. Think of a particularly bad habit you have.

2. Ask yourself, What is the feeling I get before I do this? (the cue)

3. Ask yourself, What would I rather do in response to this cue, instead of doing what I’ve always done? (the routine)

3.1. Your answer is your better routine, and therefore your better habit!

4. Replace your old routine with the new one as often as you can (for example, when you catch yourself feeling the cue, remind yourself of the new routine OR when you catch yourself doing the old routine, stop and remind yourself of the new one OR even better, make it really easy to do the new one by placing things in strategic places - I place my water bottle right next to my computer and never place any sweets there anymore).

5. The more you repeat the new one, the easier it gets.

So say I want to stop procrastinating on important tasks. I think about the feeling I get before I start procrastinating and it's almost always URGENCY. When I feel pressured to do something NOW (like when there's a deadline), I put it off. And the more I put it off, the worse my stress gets.

So I decide, instead of putting things off and getting stressed by this feeling of urgency, what if the minute I felt the urgency, I did it right away? And then a step further - what if to AVOID the feeling of urgency, I were to start doing things before they were due? So if I had to release something this Friday, what if I got everything ready by Thursday? That way, I wouldn't be stressed and there will even be time for last minute changes! And one step further, what if I actually removed all deadlines from my life so I wouldn't feel stressed?

And notice how doing something the "experts" advise - to put a deadline on it or tell someone you're doing it or put it on your calendar, etc. - would totally backfire on me because of the pressure? We need to be self-aware of how our brains work and how we react to negative situations before we adjust our habits, or the latter will flop, always. So if stress is motivating for your friend, it may be completely demotivating for you. (We'll talk about it on Day 4!)

And if I don't have a say in whether something has a deadline or not, I always just focus on doing tomorrow's work today, to stay calm.

“The switch from doing everything at the last minute to doing tomorrow’s work today has truly made me a better creative/business owner. ”

Even though the exercise we just did is pretty simple, it's still a lot of work to identify all the cues (knowing what they are helps) and replace all the bad routines we've gotten ourselves into. It's impossible to do that, and it's not exactly something we want to be doing with all of our time and energy.

Which is why during this entire training we’ll focus on:

digging deep and getting to the core of your bad habits
focusing on tipping habits, aka habits that create a tipping or an avalanche effect that does more than just eliminate ONE bad habit, but overall improves your life and creative process

And that laser focus on what really matters will make a real change. :)

In the end, it all comes down to this quote: