The Power & Danger of Habits

I’m Andy Temte and welcome to the Saturday Morning Muse! Start to your weekend with me by exploring topics that span leadership, business management, education, and other musings designed to support your journey of personal and professional continuous improvement. Today is December 21, 2024.

As we march toward the end of 2024, the final two episodes of the Muse will be dedicated to personal planning and the New Year’s resolutions that listeners may be contemplating. If you’ve been following my musings, you know I’m not a fan of New Year’s resolutions because most are grandiose statements that have little chance of success. Recent studies show that 80 percent of resolutions are in the trash by February and that only 8 percent of resolutions are still valid at the end of the calendar year.

There are myriad reasons why making New Year’s resolutions is an exercise in futility, but most likely center around the lack of a well established vision for the future that’s grounded in a well-defined personal purpose. With no purpose or vision, it’s difficult to build a solid plan to execute. Without a plan, a resolution is simply a collection of words that have little chance of turning into action. Therefore, leading into next week’s Muse, I encourage you to download my free Personal Planning Guidebook, read through it, and complete the Personal A3 Exercise to help you determine your desired future state, blockers, asset inventory, and mentors/coaches so that you can build a roadmap for the changes you’d like to make on the way to a better you.

Another reason why resolutions are likely to fail is that they collide with the habits we’ve formed and calcified through the years. Consciously developing and maintaining positive habits can be a powerful tool for personal and professional growth. For example, developing the habit of getting up early to accommodate a morning workout can be beneficial for your mental and physical health. Adopting the habit of unplugging from devices and staying away from blue light sources before bed can aid in sleep effectiveness which has all sorts of mental and physical benefits.

Unfortunately, many habits are formed without the benefit of foresight, planning, and conscious thought. Here, we do something once or twice, that ‘thing,’ whatever it is, seems efficient and plausible at the time, so we just keep doing it. These behaviors are all around us. Why do we take the same route to and from work each day? Are we certain it’s the most efficient route, or is it so engrained in our subconscious that we don’t think twice about researching and selecting alternative routes? I’ve wasted time in traffic on many occasions because my subconscious led me on my ‘normal’ route. The concept of researching and experimenting with alternative routes periodically floats into working memory, but is quickly batted away because doing so feels like too much effort. So I keep doing the same thing, over and over, when I know, or should know, that there are likely better alternatives.

Now think of your work life and the day-to-day habits you’ve formed in executing your job. If you did a formal efficiency analysis of your work, many inefficient habits would likely surface with each falling into one or more categories of the 10 wastes of continuous improvement—wasted motion, processing, transportation, emotion, meetings, etc. For more on the 10 wastes, pick up a copy of my second book, The Balanced Business, and turn to chapter 14.

In my previous executive management roles, I was frequently surprised and fascinated by the bad work habits that were exposed during value stream mapping or process mapping events we would hold at the team level.

So what’s really going on? We know that humans are resistant to change. We’re hard wired that way. We also know that change is all around us. If we keep doing the same thing through time, it’s only logical that someone else has figured out a better way to do whatever thing it is we’re doing, and our calcified, habitual way of working is now out of date. What was efficient is now inefficient. This is entropy—with enough time, everything falls apart. What was once good for us is now bad because there is a new best-practice that has overtaken ‘the way things have always been done.’

So yes, habits can be powerful and beneficial. They can also become an anchor to progress and detrimental to career growth. Habits can become the fast pass to a fixed mindset.

What’s the bottom line today? Adopt a continuous improvement mindset and make it a habit. When you’re on a journey of personal and professional continuous improvement, you are continually asking “why”—continually challenging old assumptions regarding the way we work and our approach to challenges. Now I want to be careful here. When you’ve adopted the habit of a continuous improvement mindset, are you constantly asking “why?” The answer is an emphatic no—asking why all the time would be annoying, counterproductive, and lead to paralysis. Continuous improvement is a balancing act and striking the right balance between questioning how things get done and getting things done is essential for success.

So to get the most out of the power of habits, combine the conscious adoption of new, positive habits with a continuous improvement mindset to avoid falling into the trap of entropy and “the way it’s always been done.” Combine these tools with the outputs of your Personal Planning A3 and you’ll never have to falsely commit to a New Year’s resolution again!