James Clear has some gems of advice for changing habits. I heard a few of them on a podcast yesterday, and what struck me was how applicable they are to the work environment.

I haven’t read the book yet, and I didn’t write down everything he had to say, but here are the ones that stood out for me:

Optimise your environment for the behaviours you want to encourage. Make good behaviour easy to do, bad behaviour hard. E.g. Biscuits go in the back of a cupboard, fruit goes out on display.

If necessary, change what you measure. If a behaviour isn’t intrinsically rewarding for you, measure a rewarding thing it leads to instead. I don’t like exercise, but I do like being able to get my head on my knees.

Start with what you know you can stick do on a bad day. In other words, create a floor, below which you and others will not go.

Standardise before you optimise. Get people showing up habitually to do the thing, even if its the minimum, habitually. Once you’ve cracked that you can raise the bar.

If you’re a parent, model what you want to see your children do. Children, and team members will follow what you do, not what you say.

If it’s hard to change AND stay with the grain of a group you’re in, change the group. We are social creatures and we ike to fit in. Sometimes the best thing to do when you can’t is to leave, and find a group where the grain goes with what you’re trying to achieve.

Never miss twice. Life will happen. You will miss. But don’t stop just because you missed once.

As ever, Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.