[Tim Brownson]

I just wanted to post this Blog and ask if anybody can shed anymore light on where the 21 or 30 day habit thing came from and if I am way off base here.

Cheers
Tim

I’ve had a similar conversation with about 4 different life coaching clients in the last month or so about breaking and/or changing habits. In fact it even triggered this post a few days ago. On each occasion the client believed that it took between 14 and 30 days to create a new habit. I’m not sure where this figure came from (I actually have The 7 Habits in the back of my mind for some reason but I could well be wrong on that, so don’t quote or sue me!) but I am fairly confident it’s incorrect and the real mark is 90 days+. If it were true it would be fairly easy for people to stick to diets, quit smoking, exercise regularly etc because most people could tough it out for less than a month and come out smiling at the other end with their shiny new behavior in place.

I know lots of people that have joined a gym and gone regularly for a few weeks before quitting and I also know lots of people that have started a healthy eating regime and its collapsed after a similar amount of time. As for smoking, well don’t get me going on that one, it seems every smoker I have ever spoken to has given up for short periods of time, usually about an hour 20 or so times per day.

So what’s the deal here?

Let me start by saying that we do need habits or rituals to help us in life. We spend a lot of time on auto-pilot (about 90% of our day) so the more good stuff that we do automatically the better. As a kid you were probably mercilessly beaten if you didn’t brush your teeth, right? Ok, maybe not beaten but certainly asked nicely to do it each morning and evening. Not many people are getting calls from their parents into their 30’s to make sure that they haven’t sneaked off to bed without cleaning their gnashers because it’s become a ritual well before then. If you are getting calls by the way, you may want to either change your phone number or hire a life coach. Or better still, do both.

Not that I’m suggesting fro one moment that it takes 30 years to build up a habit because that really would make going to the gym a problem. Just when you get it cracked it’s time for that hip replacement and you lose all momentum. What I am saying though, is plan for it to take 3 to 4 months because not only do you have to form a new pathway in your brain, but also the old pathway or habit has to atrophy through lack of use. Think of it like walking through a meadow of long grass. The first time you do it and glance back the grass has returned and you can barely see where you walked. By the 50th time though there is a clear pathway and the old route you used to take has started to grow over. Is this grounds for concern? Absolutely not, unless you have just been told that you have 30 days to live in which case you’re screwed, but then again you already knew that so apologies for my lack of tact.

There is something in sales called managing customer expectations and it is an excellent concept to map over to self-development. If you sell a product and tell a customer they will get delivery in 7 days and it takes 10 they will be unhappy and may even cancel. If you tell them it will take 14 days but you will do your best to improve on that and you get it to them in 10, you are a hero. The result is exactly the same but the way it is viewed is completely different. So with that logic in mind, if you tell yourself that you can develop a habit in 30 days and it doesn’t stick you will in all likelihood lose interest and quit. On the other hand, if you have told yourself it will take 120 days then you will be more likely to push through because you are focusing on getting to that mark. The good news is that if sticks sooner you are as happy as a cat with the key to the cream factory.

In my experience most of the people that fail with personal goals do so because they set themselves inflexible targets. Then when they don’t meet them they get disillusioned and inclined to quit. Often they will do this just as they are about to make a significant breakthrough and that is a real tragedy in my opinion. Of course I’m a life coach and I’d encourage you to set yourself stretching goals, but be prepared to adjust if and when you need to, that way you will insulate yourself against disappointment and self-retribution and be infinitely more likely to meet your expectations.