Hi All,
I hope you had a great week. Here is your weekly dose of “On-Track” advice, just in time for the weekend:
1. Your behaviors change when your identity does.
Your current behaviors reflect your current identity. What you do is the result of what you believe. To change habitual behaviors, you must start believing new things about yourself. True behavior change is identity change.
2. If you want to form a new habit, focus on putting in consistent efforts.
The key to forming new habits is repetition. It is through repeated exposure that the brain learns to perform a behavior more effectively and efficiently. This means that if you want to learn a new habit, such as reading, exercising, or meditating, you must repeat an action consistently and in the same context.
Your Weekly Digest: The Habit Loop
This week’s article on MikevanderPoel.com is titled, “What Is a Habit? And More Importantly, How Does It Form?” It distills the most fundamental information about habits and explains why they are important and how they form.
Look at any habit, and you see that—besides reinforcing your identity and forming through repetition —they can be broken down into four steps: cue, craving, routine, reward. This is called the habit loop, and it is active every moment you are alive, scanning the environment, predicting what will happen, trying out different actions, and learning from the results.
The habit loop provides a framework for understanding what causes you to engage in certain habits. More importantly, it offers a guide to creating good habits and breaking bad ones. I can tell you from experience: The habit loop is a powerful tool.
Until next week,
Mike van der Poel
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