Coaching practices for Make Habits Easier

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Make Habits Easier, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

  • My new habits only survive on the good days when I’m rested and motivated, then the first hard, exhausting day comes and they collapse
  • I keep meaning to start a good new habit
  • I’m trying to fix ten things at once and drowning, but I’ve noticed that on the days I actually do one particular thing, everything else somehow falls into place easier
  • I genuinely want to do the thing
  • There are a dozen things I want to fix and I have no idea which one to start with

Practices that may help

  1. Shrink the behavior until it’s tiny
    Scale the habit down to something you can do even on your worst, busiest day.
    Tiny Habits, Made Practical
  2. Engineer cues for habits you want
    Place obvious, consistent triggers in your environment to start a desired routine.
    The Power of Habit, Made Practical
  3. Find your keystone habit — the one that cascades into others
    Identify a single habit whose consistency seems to lift other behaviors along with it.
    The Habit Loop, Made Practical
  4. Reduce friction for good behaviors to near zero
    Make the healthy behavior the path of least resistance by removing every avoidable obstacle between you and starting.
    Environment Design for Behavior Change
  5. Locate your single highest-leverage habit
    Pick the one behavior whose presence seems to make several other good behaviors easier.
    Keystone Habits: The Few Changes That Cascade
  6. Focus on keystone habits
    Change one high-leverage habit that cascades into other positive changes.
    The Power of Habit, Made Practical
  7. Habit stacking
    Anchor a new habit to one you already do: “After [current habit], I will [new habit].”
    Atomic Habits, Made Practical
  8. Design the habit to be no-fail even on your worst day
    A habit that can be skipped on hard days will be skipped — the minimum must survive your worst-case day.
    Mini Habits, Made Practical
  9. Make it attractive with temptation bundling
    Pair a behavior you should do with one you want to do.
    Atomic Habits, Made Practical
  10. Build the capture habit before anything else
    Install one habit at a time — start with ubiquitous capture — before adding other ZTD practices.
    Zen To Done (ZTD), Made Practical

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