How positive habits can be transformed into small daily habits to improve your life
Positive Habits
‘Teaching our snakes how to bite us’.
That is what one of my brother coaches from another local Jiu Jitsu club call the process of teaching Jiu Jitsu. You teach a new club member the basics of Jiu Jitsu. One day as you are grappling with the new student, they submit you with the perfect execution of a technique you taught them. You have taught your snakes how to bite you. Your snakes have adopted new positive habits and little by little they have improved.
Dougal is one of our exceptional Jiu Jitsu club members. When he first walked in the club he seemed like a humble positive man. As with all the new people who walk into our Jiu Jitsu club, I hoped he would last the distance. We do all we can to make new people feel welcome and support their development. Not everyone succumbs to the addiction of Jiu Jitsu. Dougal kept coming. As one of the coaches, I shared the basics techniques with him as did Travis, our master coach and black belt.
About two years later Dougal became our first home grown Blue Belt in our newly established Jiu Jitsu club in Raglan.
The other night I was watching Dougal roll (grapple). He was moving with great technical efficiency and now executing leg and ankle locking techniques beyond my knowledge. Dougal had mastered the basic techniques and then consistently applied what he had been taught. This man kept moving forward. He had adopted a focus of positive habits and transformed my encouragement of good habits into his own process of development. Dougal had become one of my snakes that could now easily bite me!
What are my good habits?
A truly knowledgeable man has been mentoring me through the development of a digital business. This man has an immense knowledge of marketing and has over the last couple of years helped me to write a book and develop a website. While helping me develop my websiye he is working on his own digital projects.
We catch up, set goals, and move forward. During the catch ups I write down every scrap of useful information he shares with me. This is followed by research and study on the areas I need to acquire more knowledge.
The desire to acquire more knowledge during the Covid-19 lockdown intensified. I was extremely focused on my projects. This was partially to take my mind off the fall in my income. This process of distraction had allowed me to complete quite a lot development work.
The development work was discussed during one of our mentor ‘Zoom’ catch ups. I shared the progress I had made with my digital business. My mentor was incredibly surprised and complemented me on the progress I had made. He kept saying,
“How did you get so much done?”
I casually said that I had only done what he had shown me to do. There were a few paths I had followed on the development of my digital business that had now given me knowledge I could share with my mentor. We shared a good laugh about this as I kept saying,
“But I am only doing what you showed me to do”
Teaching Positive Habits
It had come down to “teaching our snakes how to bite us”
We discussed how the progress had been achieved. The process was something that emerged not initially a conscious intention. We determined I had developed an agreement with myself. This agreement had morphed into a commitment of minimum daily work. I realised I had determined a minimum level of output each day below which I would not fall. The output may be more on some days, but I would never fall below my pre-determined minimum.
May I ask you a question?
What are your daily habits to improve?
What is your daily minimum effort or Daily Individual Effort? (D.I.E) Or are you going to D.I.E. trying? The death in this metaphor is the death of your achievement. Are you prepared to determine a minimum playful amount of effort below which you will not fall? The agreement of minimum effort is the key. This is the consistent minum effort rather than a massive undertaking. It is a small repeatable forward moving commitment. A 1% improvement each day.
In 2003, Dave Brailsford was hired as the performance director of British Cycling, the governing organization for professional cycling in Great Britain. Brailsford’s first act was to commit British Cycling to a performance strategy called
“the aggregation of marginal gains”.
He relentlessly searched for tiny margins of improvement in everything British Cycling did.
“The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improve it by 1 percent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together.”
– Dave Brailsford
Brailsford worked with coaches to redesign bike seats to make them more comfortable, to rub alcohol on bike tires before a race for better grip, to ask riders to wear over shorts which maintained ideal muscle temperature and to use biofeedback sensors which monitored their actual performance. British Cycling even tested fabrics in a wind tunnel so riders could use the lightest and most aerodynamic versions possible.
They looked everywhere to try and make tiny 1 percent improvements. British Cycling painted the inside of their team trucks white to make it easier to spot dust which would affect bike performance. They even hired a surgeon to teach the riders how to wash their hands to reduce their chances of catching a cold.
None of these changes were big or significant but hundreds of small improvements snowballed. British Cycling had won just one gold medal at the Olympics since 1908 but within five years of Brailsford taking over, the British Cycling team won an astounding 60 percent of the gold medals available at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.
When the Olympic Games went to London four years later, British Cycling set nine Olympic records and seven world records. Furthermore, in 2012, Bradley Wiggins became the first British cyclist ever to win the Tour de France. British cyclists would go on to win in 2015, 2016 and 2017 giving the British team five Tour de France wins in six years.
“How does this happen? How does a team of previously ordinary athletes transform into world champions with tiny changes that, at first glance, would seem to make a modest difference at best? Why do small improvements accumulate into such remarkable results, and how can you replicate this approach in your own life?”
– James Clear
Atomic Habits: The life-changing million copy bestseller
While most people look for a big event or a big step forward to become a defining moment, small (even 1 percent) improvements daily in your personal and work habits, can be awe inspiring.
“The difference a tiny improvement can make over time is astounding. Here’s how the math works out: if you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done. Conversely, if you get 1 percent worse each day for one year, you’ll decline nearly down to zero. What starts as a small win or a minor setback accumulates into something much more.”
– James Clear
“Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them. They seem to make little difference on any given day and yet the impact they deliver over the months and years can be enormous.
It is only when looking back two, five, or perhaps ten years later that the value of good habits and the cost of bad ones becomes strikingly apparent.”
– James Clear
Conclusion – Determining the size of the daily habits to improve.
When embarking on a new project or endeavour I have often experienced a sense of overwhelm. While feelings of determination are present the amount of work to accomplish a given goal has at times seemed out of reach. The only course of action has been to break the work down into small steps. This is nothing new. The human tendency with goal setting is to overestimate the daily commitment. The bite sized chunks are too large.
A commitment to 100 push ups twice a week will give me 200 push ups in 7 days. A commitment to 30 push ups a day gives me 210 push ups for the week. Volume is greater than intensity.
This is the “the aggregation of marginal gains”. This is where positive habits can become the daily induvial effort (D.I.E) so you do not have to D.I.E. trying.
Can you look yourself in the mirror and say, “These are my good habits”? These are the minimum things I will do to support my 1% progress each day. These are my daily habits to improve my life.
