4 Steps In Every Habit | BrianJPombo.com

Brian talks about the 4 steps in every habit from James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits.

Transcription

Four steps in every habit.

Hi, I’m Brian Pombo. Welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

Today I wanted to talk again about a chapter of this book or section out of this book, Atomic Habits by James Clear.

This is the fourth such video and podcasts that we’ve been doing regarding this topic.

It’s a really interesting idea, because this is that these first few are just laying the foundation of what his whole concept is about. And it’s not something that he created. In fact, I first heard about this habit loop from a Charles Duhigg book, The Power of Habit.

It’s a very interesting book very well written with a lot of great stories. And this one is, is a little more instructive.

This Atomic Habits is a little more instructive. And this is a great chapter on that, because it lays the foundation for the rest of the book.

So the rest of the book, he goes through each of these four steps, and how it relates to both good habits and bad habits.

So this is really good stuff.

Let me see here. Let me dig into some of my favorite quotes here. I really like this one, because I think it was one of the things that really pushed me away from anything having to do with even the concept of habits.

And it was this, he said, habits do not restrict freedom, they create it. In fact, the people who don’t have their habits handled are often the ones with the least amount of freedom.

That’s a strange paradox.

If you think about it, you know, because if it’s something that you’re stuck doing, you think of a bad habit. If it’s something you’re stuck doing, that’s a lack of freedom. But what if it’s a good habit?

What if it’s something that provides you something good in the long run, but it’s not necessarily super enjoyable while you’re doing the brushing, you know, you’re brushing your teeth, you take anything that you consider a good habit, it doesn’t necessarily have a huge boost of anything right up front which is what makes it useful.

Okay, that and that’s, it’s the reason why we’ve given the ability to have habits in our brain, no doubt that this, this is a useful function of the human condition.

And so it’s really coming to that coming to terms with that idea myself, that led me to dig deeper and deeper into habits and how they can be useful how we can use them to our benefit, while at the same time being able to drop habits that we don’t like that aren’t useful.

They are useful to some extent, obviously, they provide something otherwise we wouldn’t be doing them is just oftentimes bad.

We call them bad habits because they’re bringing something worse in that we’re getting more bad out of them than good out of them.

We go on here, there’s a whole lot that I went through that I’m not going to cover here, but the main thing I want you to look at is the habit loop.

The habit loop starts with a cue, and then goes to craving and then a response, and then a reward.

Then the idea is that the cue, the first step, ends up getting connected with the last step. When you get the cue, when you get the thing that is that lead you into the process of the habit, you’re relating it to the reward at where it’s instantaneous, so you don’t even think about it.

But even your brain begins to react as if it were getting the reward in the long run, which is a really interesting thing as they’ve studied this.

You can go on and on about these things. And he does the whole rest of the book is based off of this, and I’m not going to spend time on every single chapter, I’ll give you a piece out of every section.

So he has sections of this book tied into what he calls the laws that are built off of these queues. So not these queues, but these steps. So the first law is the is the queue. And how do you how do you create a good habit?

It’s a very simple, you make it obvious, you have to have a queue that is completely obvious. That’s how you create a new good habit. How do you create the craving, you got to make it attractive?

There has to be something attractive about this process.

Number three, you got to make it easy and to get the response.

So it has to be easy for you to do and number four, you’ve got to have a reward. So you make it satisfying, there has to be a satisfying into it And he goes into depth on this later on. But these are just the basic steps. So the same steps are true even of a bad habit.

So how do you go about diffusing it, you just you turn it backwards. So number one for a cue, you make it invisible, you find a way to make a bad habit invisible.

Number two for the craving, you make it unattractive instead of making it attractive, it’s got to be made unattractive.

Number three, you got to make it difficult.

And number four, you got to make it unsatisfying.

So you just make it the reverse of those. And it sounds Oh, yeah, that’s nice in theory, but honestly, I started doing this was all my bad habits. And he said, he says it here he says,

What if I can find that section if you can, if you can get rid of a habit, the only thing you need to do is really diffuse, diffuse one of them. That’s all you need to do one of those things needed to be diffused, in order for a habit to start breaking down.

This is interesting, because every time I’ve attempted to get rid of a habit that was stuck, my brain would always tell me that, well, you’re always going to find a way around it, you’re always going to find a way around any obstacle you place in your way.

But it’s not necessarily true. If you make it easier to do something that’s good for you versus do something that’s bad for you, or are bad for you in excess, then you’re you’re not going to do that thing. It’s a very simple process.

He says if behavior is insufficient in any of the four stages, it will not become a habit, eliminate the cue and your habit will never start reduce the craving, and you won’t experience enough motivation to act, make the behavior difficult, and you won’t be able to do it.

If the reward fails to satisfy your desire, then you’ll have no reason to do it again in the future. Without the first three steps of behavior will not occur. Without all four of behavior will not be repeated.

The simple idea it gets a little complicated as you start going into practice. But if you can get that idea, and start wrapping your mind around it, you can start any good habit you’re looking to start and you can. And there’s a lot of difficulties with that, especially in starting a good habit.

There’s a whole bunch of things that get in the way because we get too ambitious, we get too bored.

There are all these things that get in the way of developing good habits. But getting rid of bad habits is simple. If you realize you just have to make it difficult, you got to make you know all the things that I listed. It’s a great chapter in a great book, Atomic Habits by James Clear.

Tomorrow night, I’m going to cover some of these other areas in the book. And we’ll speed through this this won’t this won’t be you know, a month long excursion into this book. I just wanted to touch on some of the points hopefully encourage you to check out the book yourself or to start thinking about habits yourself.

I will go through some of the some of my favorite books on habits when we’re through with this get these were kind of the starter books that led me in to read atomic habits.

So we’ll get into that eventually. In the meantime, I’ll see you tomorrow.

Go check out my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business get a free copy at AmazonProofBook.com.

That’s all I have for tonight. Have a good one. We’ll see you tomorrow.

In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.