Identify, Capture, and Change Your Anti-Habits
Getting what you want in life comes down to one thing: your behavior.
In reality, knowing what’s most important to you (your values) and choosing what to go after (your key results and projects) are just ideas. It’s not until you turn those ideas into behaviors that things around you start to change.
Behaviors aligned with our values and projects should always be the priority. But sometimes, we tend to “get in our own way.” Similarly to anti-values, which are the thoughts and beliefs that prevent us from succeeding, anti-habits are the behaviors that prevent us from getting what we want.
Each of us has a unique handful of anti-habits that tend to get in our way from time to time. We can decrease anti-habit occurrences by recognizing these behaviors, understanding the conditions that encourage them, and creating “safeguards” for ourselves.
In this post, you’ll learn how to:
Identify and capture your anti-habits
Dissect and reflect on them
Create safeguards to prevent them in the future
To apply the lessons and principles in this post, you can use the LearnChangeDo Anti-Habit Database.
1. Identify and Capture Your Anti-Habits
Our unique anti-habits may have occurred throughout our lives or just started recently. In either case, being able to identify them, either by ourselves or through some helpful feedback, is the first step toward changing them.
Here are two strategies you can use to start identifying your anti-habits:
Start with What You Know About Yourself
When asked, each of us could probably come up with a short list of “bad habits” that we wish we did less frequently. We may also be able to name a few habits that significantly get in our way of what’s most important to us.
For this first strategy, give yourself an honest assessment and write down any obvious anti-habits you wish you did less of.
A guiding question you can use is, “What one habit, if stopped completely, would make the most positive impact in my life?”
Anti-habits can include anything that gets in the way of achieving what you want in life. They can be related to your health, workflow, interactions with others, or anything in between.
When you capture an anti-habit, always write it beginning with a verb that defines the behavior. This will be important when you start creating safeguards for decreasing them.
For this first strategy, jot down any anti-habits that come to mind and move on to the next step when ready.
Get Helpful Feedback from Trusted Sources
One good indicator that you’ve identified an anti-habit is if someone has made you aware of it.
Throughout our lives, we’ve all received a ton of feedback from others. This feedback could’ve come from friends, family members, mentors, teachers, supervisors, coaches, or partners. Depending on the source and how much you trust the person giving it, this feedback can be constructive in identifying any anti-habits you might’ve overlooked in the first strategy.
Over time, as you pursue your values and projects, continue to add any additional anti-habits you become aware of, either through your own self-awareness or the help of others. Over time, you should have a concise list of anti-habits that you’ll work on changing.
2. Dissect and Reflect
Now that you’ve captured an initial list of your anti-habits, the next step is to take a look at each and do two things:
Dissect it to understand its causes and functions
Continually reflect on it through journaling
Dissect Your Anti-Habits
As covered in How to Change a Habit or Behavior, all behaviors occur in a four-part loop:
Motivation
Prompt
Behavior
Reward
Any anti-habit you captured in the sections above operates inside this loop. The key to changing or decreasing an anti-habit is to increase your awareness and understanding of the following:
What prompts the occurrence of the anti-habit (when does it tend to happen?)
The rewards that make you keep doing it (so you can find a better behavior or make it harder or impossible to do)
Using the LearnChangeDo Anti-Habit Database or a notebook, jot down any observations you’ve made about the context in which each anti-habit tends to occur. This can include places, people, certain situations, emotional states, or anything else that seems to precede the occurrence of the anti-habit.
Then, consider which of the following reasons you’re probably doing the anti-habit:
Is it because the anti-habit gives you access to something you want?
Is it because the anti-habit makes others give you positive attention?
Is it because the anti-habit makes you feel good?
Is it because the anti-habit lets you avoid something you don’t want?
Cultivating awareness about the anti-habit will enable you to start making positive changes.
Reflect On Your Anti-Habits
Of course, creating this kind of awareness about your behavior doesn’t happen all at once — it takes time and continual reflection. That’s why you should frequently reflect on and dissect your anti-habits over time.
Over time, as you notice occurrences of your anti-habits, return to your list and do some journaling around two things:
What prompted or encouraged the behavior to occur
Ideas on how you can prevent it in the future
Similarly to Insight-Based Journaling, this is a self-reflective process you should engage in regularly. The more you do, the more awareness you’ll be able to create around the causes and occurrences of your anti-habits.
3. Create Safeguards
Now that you’ve captured a list of all the anti-habits you’re aware of and have begun to dissect and reflect on them, you’re ready to make initial efforts to start changing these behaviors. This is a process called Creating Safeguards.
Creating safeguards is about implementing the ideas you’ve been capturing in your journaling about how to:
Make the anti-habit harder to do
Make the anti-habit impossible to do
Replace the anti-habit with a more appropriate one
See How to Change a Habit or Behavior for more on changing and manipulating your anti-habits.
Putting It All Together
Creating awareness around the behaviors that inhibit and limit you can be challenging. But with the right tools, anyone can learn to identify and create a plan to decrease them.
To do this, you can:
Identify and capture your anti-habits, both by yourself and with the help of a trusted person
Analyze the antecedents and functions of your anti-habits
Create safeguards to decrease, stop, or replace your anti-habits
Three Ways to Apply What You Just Learned
Download the LearnChangeDo Anti-Habit Database and start creating awareness around the behaviors that limit you the most
Learn more about starting and changing behavior in my complete guide to changing behavior here
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or send me an email with a question here: gabe@learnchangedo.org