How to Create High Performance Habits
Have you ever wondered how certain people are able to seemingly do an impossible number of things in their day to day lives?
Or how people who perform at the highest level got to that point? The key is that they developed high-performance habits that allowed them to save time, be more efficient, and work more effectively towards their goals.
In this post I will tell you everything you need to know to begin creating any new habit, or get rid of any bad habit you hate. I will begin by breaking down exactly what a habit is and some of the science behind it, then I will show you the step by step process to creating new habits or changing the bad ones.
Finally, I will outline the key strategies you need to use to ensure that you will be successful whenever you go to implement these processes, allowing you to form lasting habits that will work for you throughout your life.
What is a Habit?
Habits are a routine that may be hard to give up and is in our subconscious mind. The fact that habits are subconscious indicates that the majority of what we do every day is a habit. How we drive, how we eat, tying our shoes, when we do things, how we do things, our routines are all habits.
Our minds have to make habits in order to simplify the world and our decision-making process. Habits allow us to think about more important things while our body performs menial tasks.
If something is in our conscious mind it isn’t a habit, but this is also why habits are so powerful. You can hack your life by creating good habits so that you do the important things in your life automatically, and then everything else in life becomes easier and less stressful.
However, if we leave our minds to make habits without any direction from us it often forms bad habits. Why is this? The answer lies in what a habit is.
A habit consists of a three-part cycle: a cue, a routine, and a reward.
The cue initiates the routine (what we typically think of as the habit). Your cues typically come in one of five categories:
Location
Time
Emotional state
The people around you
Your immediately preceding action
After the routine is performed, and some desire we have is satisfied, our brain releases dopamine as the reward. If the cycle is repeated enough times our brain will store that habit in our subconscious mind.
The issue with letting our brain create habits on its own is that a lot of things that are bad for us cause our brains to release dopamine, such as sugar, watching TV, or social media. So, we have to take an active role in forming our habits.
The rate at which habits are formed is dependent on the number of times the cue, routine, reward cycle is performed. The more often it is performed the faster the habit will take hold.
Now you know what a habit is and how it works you may be wondering how you can use all of this information to allow you to go forward and live your best life. That is what I will get into now.
How to create lasting high-performance habits
Before you can create a new habit or change an old one you first need to find your underlying motivation. Why is it that you want to make this change?
If you don’t know why this is important to you, then you will fall off the bus at the first sign of adversity and wont form any new habits. Are you forming these habits so that you can have more free time, be more productive, become better at your work?
Or even better, are you doing it for someone else or for the glory of God? Are you doing this so that you can better help people or improve someone else's life that counts on you? The most powerful motivations come from outside of ourselves.
Creating a New Habit
To create a new habit, you must:
Identify the routine you want to perform
Come up with a cue
Come up with a reward
Test the habit
Identifying the routine you want to perform will be dictated by what your goal is and how you want to achieve it. If you want to lose fat you could do more cardio, eat less, eat healthier, lift weights, or a number of other things.
You may try to start a habit of running but find that you hate it and instead swimming is much more enjoyable; or maybe you modify your diet and that fixes your problem because you already do enough exercise.
Choosing the right routine to fulfill your goal isn’t always straight forward and will take time to hone in on the best option.
Once you have decided on a routine, you need to find a cue. The key is that the cue has to be simple and specific. Meaning, it needs to be simple enough so that it can be easily initiated, and it needs to be specific so there is no ambiguity as to whether the cue was triggered or not.
For example, someone may decide they want to have a routine of running in the mornings. Maybe they choose their cue to be putting on their running shoes. Putting on your shoes is easy and there is no ambiguity as to whether you have them on or not.
However, this cue may not work if you use your running shoes for other things. Maybe the shoes you run in are the same ones you wear around every day. If this is the case you won’t be able to from the mental link required where putting on the shoes = going on a run. Ideally, whenever the cue is performed the routine will always be performed immediately after.
Finally, you will have to determine the reward, and it is important that your reward eventually becomes something that is intrinsic, meaning the reward comes from inside you. An intrinsic reward could be the feeling you get for having completed the habit itself, a feeling of accomplishment for having been productive, or something else.An example of an extrinsic reward would be a candy bar. Sure, it can help you initially form the habit but overtime it’s important that you wean yourself off of the extrinsic reward, otherwise you won’t perform the habit if the reward isn’t present, whereas intrinsic rewards are always there.
Changing Bad Habits
To change an existing bad habit you must:
Identify the routine
Experiment with rewards
Isolate the cue
The best way to begin identifying the harmful routines in your life is by practicing mindfulness meditation. To practice mindfulness meditation go and find a quiet place where you can sit, relax, and that has no distractions.
Try to concentrate on something, it doesn’t matter what it is. Your mind will eventually begin to wander, when this happens don’t judge the thoughts or get frustrated, let them come and go. Try to ease your mind back to the topic, but try to notice in a detached way what’s happening.
You can do this process for about 5 minutes a day and after some practice you will be able to detach from your thoughts in everyday life, allowing you to evaluate what is happening within your head, and access why it may be happening. This will give you the presence of mind to begin noticing the routines that you previously may have been blind to.
Once you have identified the undesirable routine, you need to determine what reward your body is trying to fulfill by performing the routine. You will do this by experimenting with various alternative routines that satisfy various potential cravings.
For example, let’s say that every day in the afternoon I get up from my desk, go get a cookie from the cafeteria, talk with some friends there, then come back to my desk. I want to stop eating so many cookies, so that is the routine I want to change.
Now I have to isolate the reward. Do I get a cookie because of the energy I get from the sugar rush? To test this I could have a cup of coffee with me in the afternoon, and when I want the cookie I will drink the coffee and see if the craving goes away.
Maybe I actually want to socialize with people, in this case when I want a cookie I will go over to a friend’s office and talk for 15 min and see what happens. Maybe I just want to get up and stretch my legs, so when I want the cookie, I’ll go for a 10 min walk.
Keep coming up with tests until you find something that satisfies the craving and you will have figured out the reward.
Finally, you will have to isolate the cue. In this step whenever you feel the desire to perform the routine write down your location, the time, your emotional state, who is around you, and whatever your immediately preceding action was.
Eventually you will see a pattern arise and you will be able to predict whenever that habit will be triggered. This will allow you to prevent the cue from being triggered in the first place, or satisfy the craving before the cue is triggered by performing your alternate routine preemptively.
The Key to Ensuring Lasting Success
To ensure your habit will succeed there is a three-step process you must follow:
Write out the habit you want to form and the goal this habit will help you reach.
Write out the specific steps it will take you to reach that goal.
Write out all of the struggles you will run into on the journey, along with how you will overcome them.
It has been proven time and again that if you have a step by step plan, you prepare for adversity and how you will overcome it, you will be significantly more likely to succeed in forming your new habit.
You must be specific when listing the steps, the potential adversities, and the solutions to those adversities. If there is any ambiguity you will find and excuse to not follow through and you will fail.
Remember that you aren’t going to succeed 100% of the time and that’s okay. Each day is its own battle, and the more battles you win the easier it becomes to keep winning. However, it is important that you don’t become systematic in your failure, because then you’ve formed a habit of failure that will be extremely hard to break.
Remember that the process of setting up a cue and reward is difficult and you probably won’t get it right the first time.
This process is simple, not easy, but you can do it. If you are trying to form a new habit or break an existing one and are having trouble, reach out to Isaiah and I on Instagram @crusadetomanhood or on our website crusadetomanhood.com.
Thank you for reading the post, I hope you got a ton of value out of it! Make sure to share it with any friends who may find it useful!