Hear an interview with
CHARLES DUHIGG at the
Great Work Podcast.Put It All Together: The New Habit Formula
In the Box of Crayons’ coaching skills workshops, we’ve
increasingly focused on helping participants define and commit to
specific habits (rather than to the broad and rarely acted upon
action list). To help people do that, we’ve drawn from some of the
insights above and, after testing it out in the real world, created
the New Habit Formula: a simple, straightforward and effective
way of articulating and kickstarting the new behaviour you want.
There are three parts to the formula: identifying the trigger,
identifying the old habit and defining the new behaviour. Here’s
how it works.
Identifying the Trigger: When This Happens...
Define the trigger, the moment when you’re at a crossroads and
could go down either the well-trod road of the old way of behaving
or the Robert Frost path less trodden. If you don’t know what this
moment is, you’re going to continually miss it and, with that, the
opportunity to change your behaviour.
The more specific you can make it, the
better. Charles Duhigg says that there are
just five types of triggers: location, time,
emotional state, other people, and the
immediately preceding action. You can see
how you might use a number of them to