Resolving to Form Habits Instead of Focusing on Goals.

Seven tips to forming habits that last.

We all know the drill, the new year rolls around and everyone starts focusing on what they want to change in their lives. We set lofty goals for “a better us.” What does that even mean? We often take a look at ourselves or our families and decide this is the year we will change it all! And we quickly overwhelm ourselves with too many goals, plans, and systems. We probably drive ourselves and everyone around us crazy in the process. And before we know it, probably right around now…a few weeks into the new year…we burn out and return to our regular routines. Are you there? Does this feel a little too familiar? Don’t worry! You’re not alone!

When it comes to our kids, there are so many experiences that can relate to the flurry of goal setting at the beginning of the year. As you sit in the IEP meeting each year as goals are set and plans are made. But what happens after the meeting? How are long-term goals broken down into attainable actions to not overwhelm? How will supports be put into place to ensure the plan gets activated? And perhaps most important, are the goals being set truly meaningful to the individual?

At Islands of Brilliance, we take a person-centered approach to all of our programming. Right now, we are completing our bi-annual meetings with each of our Digital Academy (DA) participants. In these meetings, we help participants reflect on their technical and soft skill strengths in areas that they would like to develop. They think about why they are participating in DA and what they hope to get out of it. Each individual is driving what their experience will be like. We then help them develop strategies to work towards their individual goals.

The same individual approach should be used when trying to form new habits, they need to be meaningful and relevant to have any lasting outcomes. There needs to be ownership of not only the outcomes but the reason to start working towards them in the first place.

Habits create reliable and predictable outcomes. Our kids thrive when there are reliable and predictable routines.

When we talk of goals, we are often talking about changing our habits – those things we do automatically without thinking. We fall into routines that create predictable outcomes. Whether they are good or bad ones, it takes time and effort to form or break them. For individuals on the autism spectrum, the predictability of routine is a huge part of what a good day looks like.

Here are seven tips to forming healthy and sustainable habits that compound into achieving long-term goals. First things first, we need to start!

1. A habit must be established before it can be improved.

We often spend so much time planning and trying to find the optimized, perfect path to our end-goal that we never actually show up to start! We create charts, complex schedules, and buy the perfect equipment. But the reality is that before we can optimize anything, we need to put in the work to form the habit itself. And we will never start if we are overwhelmed by the steps in the process of getting going!

2. Don’t get lost in the details of the big picture goal…break it down and just focus on the first two minutes.

James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones talks about the power of the first two minutes when trying to form new habits. If your long-term goal is to go for a walk after work each day, the habit you might want to work on is changing into your walking clothes and putting on your walking shoes right when you get home. You don’t even need to go for a walk if you don’t feel like it! Your task at hand is to just put on the shoes. Clear calls this mastering the decisive moment. Just by forming the habit of changing into your walking shoes, you are much more likely to take the next step of actually going for a walk! The idea is to make your habits as easy as possible to start.

3. Smaller habits compound and shape our path to bigger goals.

Clear suggests that once you begin your habit, you continually look at how you can optimize for tomorrow. And when you’re looking at that continuous improvement, keep it simple. Strive to simply be one percent better today than you were yesterday. Clear writes, “If you get one percent better each day for one year, you'll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done. This is why small choices don't make much of a difference at the time but add up over the long-term.” That effort compounds and pays off over time!

As you or your child develop one habit, they can build upon each other to reach your ultimate goal. One strategy to help develop new habits is to pair them with an easier or more enjoyable habit. This is called habit stacking.

Habit Stacking: “After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].”

Some examples of habit stacking for your child could be: After I walk in the door from school, I will take my homework out of my backpack and place it on the table. Or, After I finish dinner, I will rinse off my plate and place it in the dishwasher.

4. Don’t focus on a timeline!

Some habits can be formed easily and quickly. Others might feel like they are developing at a glacial pace. As one parent shared in our weekly Lighthouse conversation, she prepares for “1,000 trials for each task.” Consistency is far more important than chasing an arbitrary timeline. 

One great tool to use is a habit tracker. Simply write your intention at the top of a piece of paper, “I will floss my teeth every morning.” Then make 30 boxes to check off. Each time you complete the task, you check off the box. As you see the chain of x’s build, the motivation to not “break the chain” does too! Of course, there will be times we slip and we need to be alright with that. Just start a new chain, and begin the very next day. Try to never miss twice in a row!

When taking on long-term goals, one percent at a time, it can be easy to feel like these little efforts aren’t enough. As time goes on, we can lose sight of the progress being made, the energy that is compounding. 

In Atomic Habits, Clear shares a great visual to address this. "Ice melts only when it hits 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Does that mean the energy required to raise the temperature of ice from 25 to 26 to 27 to 29 to 31 degrees doesn’t matter? Of course not. You may only see results when you hit 32 degrees, but you never would have seen the ice melt had you not done all the prior work."

5. Create an environment for success, remove the obstacles.

When starting to form a new habit, we often think it comes down to sheer will power. But will power only goes so far. Your environment is the biggest aspect of changing your habits. How can you prime your environment for success? If reading more often is the habit you are trying to form, but watching TV takes up all of your time, perhaps consider removing the TV from the room you want to read in. Or at least unplug it so that you have to work to watch rather than mindlessly turning it on. 

In some of the examples above, getting started is often the biggest obstacle. That’s why taking your homework out of the backpack and putting it on the table right when you get home primes the environment to do your homework later in the evening.

6. Teamwork is dreamwork.

Have you ever tried going on a diet while the rest of your family is continuing their normal eating habits? Eating that healthy salad while everyone else is having pizza and cake is difficult to sustain. Probably the biggest influence of our environment is the people that we share it with! Forming habits becomes much easier if the people you are surrounded by are working towards building the same habits.

Many of us learn by the example of others. If we practice the same habits and model them for our children, there’s a much higher chance for success!

7. Motivation comes and goes. A habit, by definition, is something that you do reliably.

When we are trying to make a change, we often feel a surge of motivation at the beginning. Something happened to make you think of making the change in the first place, right? There can be great excitement in making the plan and dreaming of how your life will be different after achieving your goal. But long-term goals take time and over time the motivation fades. It is easy to lose sight of the progress you are making. (Don’t forget the energy it takes to melt the ice!) This is why there is such great power in forming habits that ladder up to your goals. The reliable nature of habit ensures that you keep moving towards your goals, even after the excitement of a new plan has fallen away.

So as the first month of the new year has already come to a close, don’t worry if that resolution didn’t stick. As the second half of the school year is starting for our kids, don’t overwhelm them with lists of goals to achieve by the summer. 

Maybe take a look at that IEP or transition plan with fresh eyes. Begin by taking one of the goals in there and talk to your child to discover if that goal is actually relevant to them as an individual. If it isn’t, together create a goal that is relevant…find a habit that will lead to success…and focus on the first two minutes.

Banner Photo by Lala Azizli on Unsplash