Take Time To Deeply Establish A New Habit

Take time to deeply establish a new habit. Success in any endeavor is built on the foundation of solid, high-quality habits which set and maintain us on a trajectory of growth and development. When we establish the right habits — those which are conducive to mastery, learning, and growth along our specific path — these will lead us to success.

These habits instinctively drive us to come back each day to our work, equipped with the tools that we need to deal with the problems we face in an intelligent, creative, responsible, and beneficial manner. Moreover, deeply-rooted high-quality habits are the key to permanent change in the sense of becoming better than we used to be.

For this reason, building habits is an essential element of the personal growth, learning, and mastery processes making the skill of establishing new habits one of the critical elements of these processes. The ability to take time to deeply establish a new habit is the way to effectively build powerful, long-term habits. This is a crucial technique, tool, and mindset for success along any path.

A Realistic View of the Time It Takes To Build A New Habit

The time it takes to build a habit ranges from person to person. Science tells us that the extremes range from less than three weeks to about two-thirds of a year, with slightly in excess of two months being the average.[1] Furthermore, it depends on the habit. Some habits are intrinsically more challenging than others. These will take more time to attain because they require greater levels of strength, will, and discipline to maintain, especially if they represent a significant transition, change, and development for you as a person.

Building the habit of showering first thing in the morning when you wake up is going to be easier than establishing the habit of running 10 km first thing in the morning. Standing under hot water is pleasant, it is easy, it requires minimal effort aside from the ability to remember to do so, thus there is little resistance to the task. Running immediately after waking is a dramatic transition. The difficulty of retraining ourselves in this way is compounded by any number of factors including our level of fitness, our experience with running, whether we are a morning person or not, whether we have to wake up earlier in the morning to fit the run in before work, and how consistent we are with our sleep schedule.

This only means that we require greater awareness going into the establishment of a new habit regarding how difficult it will be and how long it will likely take. A realistic perspective based on an honest perception of ourselves and the range of difficulties involved, so that we can be prepared for the inevitable failures and cyclic variations in consistency versus erraticism. Humans have an outrageous capacity for change and transformation. Though it is dependent on will, discipline, determination, and resilience. The greater the change, the greater the goal, the more challenging it will be, and the longer it will take. Be prepared in your mind from the beginning – at least as prepared as you can be when facing the challenges found in unknown places, in places within yourself you have never been – and this will increase the likelihood of your success.

This is one of the few times when I really don’t care what the science says. I don’t care what the average time is to build a habit, because the data in this context is incredibly subjective. In this case it is about feel. You can touch quality in the practice of building a new habit. You will feel when you start to get it because it becomes unconscious, automatic, instinctive.

When they thing draws you towards it and you are drawn towards it — rather than you resisting it — is a signal that your new behavior is becoming deeply implemented. (I am talking here specifically about meaningful habits, habits that are in alignment with our development, success in our career, or becoming better people for ourselves, the world, and our families.) You can touch the quality in a habit as an emotion, a flow, and a sense of openness within. Automaticity is one of the keys. When the habit becomes automatic, bypassing thought.

Slow down, take time to deeply establish a new habit

Comprehend deeply now, in this moment, that within the context of habit development, rushing will not bring you to your destination more quickly. The same holds true for personal development, learning, mastery, and skill development. The speed at which we move through something, and the time that it takes to learn it, is all relative. It depends on how difficult the thing is in and of itself, how complex, and the degree of challenge it poses for us personally.

When you begin to get lost while reading (which happens frequently in informationally dense works, especially textbooks, especially in physics and mathematics, in my experience) reading faster doesn’t help you understand better. Getting to the end of the chapter isn’t the point. In calculus, moving on to the next concept because you don’t understand the technique you are on now will not remotely help you. Moving on to the next habit because you think you’ve ‘mastered’ this one is probably going to end in you dropping all the balls that you are juggling.

When you get bored, when you feel like you are ready to move on, when your mind starts jumping around from distraction to distraction, already considering the next thing for you to do, do not listen. Your mind is wrong. Your emotions are wrong. This is not your intuition talking to you. It is your weakness. Your intuition and emotions led you to the idea of this habit, this change, in the first place. When you realize you need to change, and then start to, the internal difficulty that emerges is precisely the part of you that you are trying to change. If you listen, then you don’t change. You go right back to where you started. Do not listen to your weakness.

Rushing through the establishment of a habit is precisely missing the point. In my mind, the only truly valid reasons to seek to establish new habits exist along the lines of: to foster personal growth; to change as people; to transform our flaws and weaknesses into strengths; to refine our skills, making ourselves more efficient, more precise, and more productive; generally to refine ourselves; to optimize our processes (creative, intellectual, work-flow, parenting, living, etc.); to increase the quality of our lives; to achieve a goal, ambition, dream, or vision. All of these fall under the banner of “personal growth, mastery, and becoming better.”

The intent when we set out to establish a new habit is to create permanent change. This means that the habit we are attempting to install is itself desired as a permanent fixture (implying also that we should choose our habits with care). Does “permanent change” sound like a casual task to you? We are literally overwriting what may be a lifetime of doing things one way, installing a completely new pattern and — what is more — seeking to make that pattern, that habit, an unconscious action. An intrinsic and unconscious expression of who we are.

Grow Deep Roots, Make The Change Permanent

When building new habits, moving on too quickly does not give the time needed for deep roots to grow. These deep roots are, after all, the principle focus of establishing new habits for personal growth and mastery. Deep roots are what make the difference between long-term change and transient progress, which fades as we slip back into old patterns.

These roots represent consistency. Some people don’t like consistency. They abhor the idea of routine. However, they don’t understand that within the outwards appearance of rigidity exists the infinite potential for development and growth. I love to witness myself making progress every day in the direction of my dreams, and I have come to understand the importance, over the years, of consistency in the context of long-term goals. Some ambitions might take a decade to achieve, and some plans might take twice that to reach their premeditated endgame. We do not have the time to be stopping and starting, for months or years at a time, and having to retrace our steps again and again each time we resume our path. I don’t have the time.

Think about it like this. How many things are there that you have taken some time to learn, but only to a superficial depth. The script of a language, a song on an instrument, a subject, some art or discipline. You know for yourself how quickly those things fade with time. Yes, you can pick them up again faster when/if you need to. But there are some things that we needed the first time that we learned them, and forgot them only because we slipped backwards. The understanding, knowledge, and wisdom to take time to deeply establish a new habit is precisely what stops us from slipping. It helps us to move forwards with each step that we take, definitively.

It is over years and decades that we measure learning, personal growth, and mastery. Certainly, we can achieve great progress in a short span of time. Yet that does not change the fact that real learning takes time. Deep learning takes time. True mastery takes years. That is what our attention should be focused on simply because we want to be people of substance. We desire these qualities to intrinsically define who we are and everything that we do, not just one thing that we do in life.

Choose the habits that you establish with care, and take time to deeply establish a new habit, because you know that it is a step in the right direction. A stepping stone that will help you to reach your destination, your vision, that it is the vehicle that will take you towards where you want to go. Towards the person that you want to become.

Notes

1. Lally, Phillippa; Jaarsveld, Cornelia H. M. Van; Potts, Henry W. W.; Wardle, Jane. (2010) “How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world”. University College London. European Journal of Social Psychology. 40 : 998–1009. Published online 16 July 2009 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.674