What’s your trigger?

Goals are great but without systems in place, you’ll fail.

I believe one of the biggest reasons people fail to achieve their goals is because they haven’t given enough thought to the system that’s going to support goal attainment.

The end goal itself, for example to lose 5kg of weight or pass an exam isn’t 100% within your control, but the process goals are –  exercise for 30 minutes a day three times a week or study for 30 minutes per day. You have full control over whether you accomplish these or not.

Process goals need a system – routines and habits that get you where you want to go. 

So in terms of the above examples, this would mean specifying what days of the week those behaviours occur on, what time of the day and where you are doing it – time has memory, space has energy. It’s also helpful to know your routine, such as the specific exercises you are doing or the specific topics you’re going to study.

Habits are your system, your process, your ‘how’ and it’s only by consciously creating these, will you make progress.

Neuroscientists have traced habit-making behaviours to a region of the brain called the basal ganglia which plays a role in the development of emotions, memories and patterns. Decisions however are made in another part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex.

Initially habits take a lot of mental energy to acquire because they require decision-making, but as the pattern of behaviour (your routine) becomes automatic, the decision-making region of your brain goes into sleep mode so the brain works less and it requires less mental energy.

One way to make this automation quicker and require less energy is to concentrate on your trigger.

Every habit starts with a psychological pattern called a habit loop.

The trigger tells your brain to go into automatic mode so the behaviour can take place.

The routine is the behaviour itself.

The reward is what your brain likes that helps it remember the habit in the future because there’s something it gains from doing it, such as a sense of accomplishment.

So to quicken the process of automation, the trigger is really important – without this, regardless of how well you have curated your routine, you’ll not be able to make the habit stick.

Without a trigger, there is no habit.

For example, over my Christmas break I became a little dehydrated. I usually drink two to three litres of water a day, but because I wasn’t following my usual work routine I lost my trigger – the litre bottle of water I keep on my desk which triggers me into drinking water. So I had to create a new one.

I started to leave a pint glass by the kettle at night so when I go down to make my morning coffee, I see it, it triggers me to drink a pint of water first thing. I also created a backup trigger which was a reminder on my phone that goes off at 6am every day telling me to drink 500mls of water. 

It didn’t matter that I routinely drank water, without the trigger, I lost the habit.

So my message today is this.

The only way you’ll reach your goal is by creating a routine – a pattern of behaviour that supports goal attainment – this is your process.

However, with busy lives and so much going on, it will be easy to forget to do your routine, so you need to create a trigger to help this routine to become automatic over time – a habit.

Your trigger can be a multitude of things – a time of day (but I’d set a reminder to help you initially), an item, like my pint glass, a preceding event, like going to the gym straight after work, a location, an emotional state, another person. It doesn’t matter what you choose, the important thing is you choose one, as without a trigger there is no habit.

And let’s not  forget that habits shape our lives, for better or for worse, so it’s worth our investment of time and energy.

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