scott stonehouse

So far in our Building Habits learning journey, we have looked at The Principles and The Mechanics. Now we will look at The Support Structure. Although these posts are in order of importance, that does not mean that the support structures of our habits is unimportant. Your support structures are very important if you want to succeed in building habits.

There are four main topics that make up our habit support structure:

1. Environment
2. Community
3. Experimentation / Flexibility
4. Grace

If you want to successfully build habits for long-term identity change, you will need each of them.

ENVIRONMENT

This is one of the more powerful, yet more overlooked, aspects of building habits. Often, we are trying to build habits in an environment that makes it harder to build those habits.

Imagine trying to:
— Eat healthier with mountains of junk food in the house.
— Go for a run early in the morning while stumbling around in the dark to find socks, shoes, shorts, etc..
— Read more when the closest thing within reach of our favorite chair is the TV remote.
— Wake up early when the clock/phone is next to the bed and we are in the habit of hitting snooze.

For each of those examples, we could try and rely on motivation, willpower, and self-discipline. If we did that, we might get lucky and do it once or twice, but enough times to establish a habit? Probably not.

I am sure with each example you saw an obvious adjustment to the environment that would dramatically increase our chances of success:
— Get the junk food out of the house.
— Set out our running gear the night before.
— Put a book we want to read near our favorite chair and move the remote out of reach.
— Put the clock/phone across the room or in the bathroom.

None of those actions guarantee that we will do the behavior, but they make it a lot easier to do so and that is the goal.

“You don’t have to be the victim of your environment. You can be the architect of it.” (Atomic Habits, p. 84)

We can design our environment to help us do our habits.

Remove any obstacles or barriers in the environment that would make it harder to do the habit.

Rearrange or add things to the environment that would make it easier to do the habit.

Some more examples:
— Get rid of junk food. Add healthy snacks around the house.
— Put the guitar in the middle of the living room.
— Leave the phone in the living room rather than bringing it in the bedroom.
— Clear out and protect a writing space.

There are millions of examples of small ways we can change our environment that will make it easier to build habits.

Perhaps the people we think of as really disciplined have designed their environments to support them and, therefore, don’t rely on self-discipline. Hmmm…

COMMUNITY

Social pressure can be a really good thing or a really bad thing. We can set it up in a way to be a really good thing that will help us build habits. Here is the key:

Join a community where your desired habit is the normal behavior.

— Want to develop a running habit? Join a running club.
— Want to learn to knit? Joining a knitting group.
— Want to quit drinking alcohol? Join an AA group.
— Want to read the Bible more? Join a Bible study.
— Want to get better at public speaking? Join Toastmasters.

The friendships, accountability and social pressure from community really work. The other people in the group can both encourage and challenge us.

The group might be in-person or online.

The group could be big or it might not even be a group. Maybe it is simply a friend who is going to do it with us.

Whatever the size and however they meet, join a community of people who are already doing what you want to do.

EXPERIMENTATION / FLEXIBILITY

I mentioned this idea near the end of the previous post, but one aspect of successfully building habits is having a flexible mindset of experimentation. Too many people feel that either, (a) goals and habits can only be started on January 1, or (b) goals and habits need to be committed to for a year or the rest of your life, whichever comes first.

OK, maybe no one actually believes that, but people act that way.

It isn’t true and it is a big deal.

It keeps us from building the habits we want to build that will shape our identities to be the people we want to be.

Instead, relax. Chill. Flex. Seriously.

We can think of this as a game. We are trying out new moves and strategies. If we mess up, no big deal. Restart and try again.

Or we can think of it as if we are conducting behavioral science experiments on ourselves. What happens if we try this? What happens if we try that? If something didn’t work, we can discard it and try again until we find something that does.

We can try it for a day, a week, whatever is needed until we find what works for us.

Rigid approaches fail. Flexible approaches succeed. Maintaining an open, flexible attitude as you experiment with what works for you and what doesn’t provides a very strong support structure for building habits.

GRACE

The final topic in the building habits support structure might be the most important: Grace.

At some point, we will fail to maintain our habit. We will miss a day. Perhaps it was out of our control or maybe we were just lazy. What we do after that might be the most important decision in the entire building habits process. Jon Acuff calls it, “the day after perfect.”

We could just quit and give up on the whole process. Why did we even try? We always do this. We knew this was going to happen, didn’t we? And we can go back to the way things have always been.

Or…

We can accept the fact that we aren’t perfect. We can be proud of what we have already done. We did it for a day. Or two. Or three. Or for a couple of weeks. That’s great! And we can say, “Oh well. That was fun. Time to start again.” Because the truth is, it was fun, right? It was easy, right? Because we designed it that way. So why wouldn’t we want to start again?

The ability to genuinely accept our failures and respond to ourselves with grace is liberating.

Be gracious to yourself. Be kind to yourself. Beating yourself up is not kind nor is it helpful, so don’t do it.

CONCLUSION

That, my friends, is how to go about Building Habits. The Principles, The Mechanics, and The Support Structure.

This is about much more than simply building a specific habit. It is about learning to build any kind of habit. When we can successfully do that, we can shape our identities and be more like the people we want to be.

I would love to hear what habits you are building; what experiments you are trying. Please let me know in the comments.

I am cheering you on! I believe you can do it!

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