One size does not fit all when it comes to habit formation; here's an alternative approach.

Enjoy an excerpt from this week's upcoming Deep Dive monthly newsletter for Premium members.

In December and January, much of the conversation on Optionality (and everywhere else I visited online), centered on goals. Or habits. Or intentions. Or words of the years. Whether you’re a devotee of SMART goals or BHAG goals (which I concede is like referencing ATM machines), you get the idea.

With so many different approaches to getting things done (or GTD as GTD aficionados would call it), what do we really know about which approach works best? And how much does that depend on you?

Trying to wrangle the information available on all of the above was made that much harder by how much contradictory information is out there. The typical Google search result page I found would include headlines trumpeting both “Impossible Goals Are Easier” and “To Achieve Big Goals, Start with Small Habits” in the top 5 results alone.

How are we to figure out what works for us amidst all these differing approaches and conflicting, yet all credible, advice?

Deep Dive Excerpt: The Story Behind the Habit.

In this excerpt from our monthly deep dive newsletter for Premium members, I share one technique offered by Optionality member, Connie Kwan.

I’ve known forever that storytelling trumps data if you want someone to both feel drawn in to what you’re telling them, find it resonant, and in fact retain your information. (Or perhaps I should say data’s role is to support storytelling.) But in my years of habit formation, I never told myself stories about the habits I wanted to create. Well, to be accurate, the story was that I had a goal and if I broke it down into digestible chunks and formed habits around those digestible chunks, I would increase my chances of forming the new habits and achieving the goal.

That works most of the time.

But every now and then I can’t seem to make a habit stick even though I’ve broken it down, I’ve applied both carrot and stick consequences, and I’ve calendared it. Is it time to give up? Not according to Connie, creator of the 4Storyteller system for helping leaders level up.

Connie’s system assumes that in order to change behavior, one must rewrite the story of why the new habit matters, connecting that habit to your core values as a better anchor. Her experience is that this approach helps people find a new path to a new habit.

She did an exercise with me to “debug” why I was having trouble sticking to my desired habit of practicing the piano 3 times a week.

Habit-formation Debugging with Connie Kwan:

a.     She asked me about my core values. I listed a few…I’m here on the planet to be helpful. I’m here to act with integrity and to advance justice, especially for those who have historically been marginalized or oppressed. I’m here to be authentic and to share what I know when I believe it can be, again, helpful. None of these core values really seemed to relate to playing the piano.

b.     So, next question: What is the story I was already telling myself about why I wanted to practice the piano?  My story was that I wanted to bring more creativity back into my life…I used to be a professional singer and actor and musician. 20 years ago, I sidelined those pursuits because I didn’t want to live paycheck to paycheck anymore; I was living back in Silicon Valley, and I thought getting into tech seemed like the obvious smart thing to do. I kept my hand in for a number of years, but eventually working in tech and then running a company didn’t align well with pursuing my creativity. Why didn’t this story of creativity serve me in this case? Because eventually I spent more and more time writing (and eventually podcasting) and while those pursuits are indeed creative, they were also mostly focused around tech, media, politics…aspects of my professional life. So, now I was associating creativity with professional pursuits, and piano still didn’t fit into that story.

c.     Is there another story I could tell myself? Well, the story we came up with (or dug out of me would be more accurate) is that I do believe that, in this stage of my life, one of my core values has to be to more consciously and intentionally take care of me. Self-care as core value seems a little squicky to me, but I can tie self-care to my other core values in this way: If I want to make impact, then it would be better if I could do that for a long, long time. Now, a lot of my habits are about physical health, and even intellectual health, but what about mental and emotional health? And this is where piano practice can contribute. Music connects me to emotion in ways few other things do. Playing piano takes that connection one step farther than listening to music…it integrates emotion and physicality. And it is really one of those rare things that can be just for me because I like it. Most of the time I practice on my 88-key keyboard with headphones on instead of on my actual piano. Clearly implied in the word “practice” is that I am not going to be good most of the time; I’m going to make mistakes and flub things up, but instead of feeling performance anxiety about it, I can keep it between me and my own ears.

Thanks to this exercise with Connie I have a new story I’m anchoring this habit to…and the story is tied to my core values. It’s early days, but so far in January I practiced 8 out of the first 21 days. Much more on track than I was throughout all of 2023.

Does the storytelling approach resonate with you? Do tie your desired habits into you core values? Maybe try it with one habit and see if it helps, and report back!