4 Steps To Better Habits
“Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity” - James Clear
Lately, engaging with the love of my life feels something more like obligation than desire. That thing which used to come easy suddenly takes effort. I’m talking about my bass of course and the daily habit of practicing music that has carved out a portion of the overwhelming majority of my days for the last 25 years. “The thrill is gone” as the late great B.B. King once said. Well possibly. But I’m not ready to throw in the towel just yet! I recently read the wonderful book “Atomic Habits” by James Clear and I have renewed inspiration for how to continue my life long pursuit of being a better musician. Inspiration inspired by a plan.
The Plan
In its simplest form, the path to starting a new habit or re-energizing an old one, as is my case, has 4 parts. Mr. Clear refers to these as “The 4 Laws of Behavior Change” and they are, in my opinion, an elegant solution to this often thorny task of habit creation we all struggle with to some degree. Let’s first identify the 4 laws and then unpack them in the order and manner in which I applied them. They are as follows:
Step 1) Make it Obvious. This is referred to as the “Cue”.
Step 2) Make it Attractive. This is referred to as the “Craving”.
Step 3) Make it Easy. This is referred to as the “Response”.
Step 4) Make it Satisfying. This is referred to as the “Reward.
1st Law Of Behavior Change: Make It Obvious (Cue)
So what is a Cue? A cue is the thing that prompts you to perform the behavior that you would like to perform. It’s a trigger for your brain to initiate a behavior. Another way to say this is that your brain is essentially a prediction machine and it relies on this initial “cue” to tell it that you are close to a reward of some kind. We want to make that cue as obvious as possible which means It should literally slap us in the face and prompt us to do the damn thing. You will never succeed with a habit if you have to burn too many calories trying to look for it.
So in my case, I know that my end goal is to practice my instrument pretty much every day of the week. To effectively cue this behavior I employed two strategies: “Implementation Intention” and “Habit Stacking”.
Implementation Intention is when you make a plan beforehand about when and where to act. The formula for this is simply “When situation X arises, I will perform action Y.” James quotes a bunch of research in his book (if you want it, go buy the book!) that demonstrates the fairly intuitive concept that people are far more likely to perform an action if they predetermine when and where it will actually take place. It isn’t enough to say that you will start cooking more, walk your dog more, drink more water or whatever your thing is. You have to write it down ahead of time and give it a specific time and place!
The second layer to this initial piece of the plan is habit stacking. Habit stacking is when you pair the habit you want to create with something that you already do on a regular basis. In my case I have a ritual each morning of drinking coffee with my partner and reading the daily news briefing from the New York Times. We literally do this every morning so all I had to do was set my intention to start practicing immediately after we finished reading the news. If I put this into the implementation intention formula stated previously, I get the following: “When Wendy and I finish reading the news in the morning, I will begin practicing my instrument.”
2nd Law of Behavior Change: Craving (Make It Attractive)
“I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’ clock sharp.” - Somerset Maugham
What does it mean to “make it attractive”? Well to state the obvious, It’s much easier to do the thing when motivation is high rather than low. So make it something you not only want to do but have the requisite motivation to do. To accomplish this all important step of making it attractive, I employed the following 3 prong strategy:
Making room in my schedule to practice in the morning when my motivation is high.
Making the material I would be practicing fun.
As a little insurance I even decided to make a little extra coffee so I could pour that second cup and get to groovin with some gusto!
One thing I know about myself is that my brain is on my fire in the early morning. The creative juices are flowing and my motivation is through the roof! Inspiration is an elusive creature past about 2pm in my world so my best chance of success would be to make it a morning thing to capitalize on this energy. I also know that I love Jazz and Soul tunes from the 50’s and 60’s so I made sure that my practice material was rich with Aretha, Miles, 4 Tops and James Brown to make it fun. Then if all else fails, I have that sweet second cup of joe to push me over the edge of my potentially faltering motivation.
3rd Law of Behavior Change: Response (Make It Easy)
Now we actually get down to performing the habit! All that other stuff was just preparatory work to get us pointed in the right direction. Now we can set about to doing the damn thing.
Step 3 is all about removing friction and making our response to the Cue and the Craving outlined above as easy as possible. To eliminate as much friction as possible from my practice routine I employed the strategy of “Environment Design”. This is just a fancy way of saying that I set up my practice room in advance so that all I had to do was literally walk in, tune up and get to pumping out those tasty grooves. A common mistake musicians make is to leave their instrument in the case after a gig. This means that in order to practice you have to pull the instrument out of the gig bag, set up your amp and all that prior to practicing. Rookie mistake! That is enough friction to derail even the best of practice intentions. I made sure my bass was set up on the stand with sheet music ready, bluetooth speaker charged up and my playlist set up on my iPad. All I had to do was press play and get to it.
Another key element of “Environment Design” that is often overlooked is to make sure you have a clean room. I don’t know the science of why this is a thing or why it matters, but it is almost universally true that the creative energy can be severely stunted by too much disorder. So keep it tidy!
4th Law of Behavior Change: Reward (Make It Satisfying)
As much as your brain is a prediction machine, it only does all that prediction in anticipation of a reward. The 4th law of behavior change is to make damn sure that your brain is satisfied by the result and feels appropriately rewarded. The “Craving” creates a tension which must be released by the “Reward”. If the act of performing the burgeoning habit does not satisfy the craving, it stands little chance of survival.
We are working on two time frames here when it comes to creating satisfaction. New habits stand a far better chance of success if they provide both short and long term reward, but we have to prioritize the short term gains in the beginning. My practicing habit has long term gains built in so I didn’t have to worry about that too much. It’s obvious that I will be a better player, get more gigs and have all that great stuff long term, but what I really needed were quick wins if I was going to be successful in making this habit stick. In order to do that, I decided on a two pronged approach of choosing easy music that was fun to play and made me feel good, and I decided to post that easy, feel good music to Instagram for positive feedback and recognition.
As noted above, I chose simple, groovy soul tunes that I could literally learn in a day. This was not the time to work on the Bach Cello Suites! Save that wonderful but challenging and often defeating work for when you have the routine firmly established and aren’t likely to get derailed by a little failure.
Then to lock in the reward I posted my best practice outtakes to Instagram for recognition and positive praise. Community support is a key piece of habit formation. We are often much more motivated by extrinsic factors and the desire to belong to a group than we are by our own intrinsic motivations. For all the negative talk around social media, I think it has tremendous ability to bring us together in groups and communities that might otherwise not have existed. But even if you aren’t hip to the nutty world that is social media, it is a very good idea to have positive community feedback in support of the thing you are trying to accomplish. It may actually be the most important piece of this whole puzzle.
In Summary
Let’s bring it home with a quick recapitulation of the 4 laws of behavior change and how I applied them to my desired outcome of practicing more.
Step #1: Make it obvious
I set an “implementation intention” that outlined when and where I would practice and I used “habit stacking” to pair it with an activity I already did every morning.
Step #2: Make it attractive
I chose music that I wanted to play and I chose to do it in the morning because that is when my motivation is highest. Then I added in a little extra caffeine for insurance.
Step #3: Make it easy
I used the concept of “Environment Design” to remove friction from the process of practicing by setting up my space ahead of time with everything I needed. I also made sure to have a clean practice room to ensure good creative flow.
Step #4: Make it satisfying
I worked with intrinsic motivational factors by choosing easy music that was fun for me to play and extrinsic motivational factors by posting this music to Instagram for community support. This enabled me to have quick wins to get the habit going in a positive direction and also allowed for a sense of community and engagement.
I’m a little over a month into this process of practicing mostly everyday and I have to say this strategy works better than expected. I feel re-energized to practice and most importantly am having a ton of fun with the process. Probably more than I can remember having in the last 10 years or so. So if you have a habit you are trying to get off the ground, I highly recommend reading the book and trying out some of these ideas. Good luck!
