13 Jan How you can use the power of celebration to make new habits stick
This post, like most posts on this blog, is to your happiness!
And your happiness, I assume, is associated at least to some extent to achieving any New Years Resolutions you set a few weeks ago.
Even if you didn’t set any NY Resolutions you probably have goals; at least I hope you do; because setting and achieving meaningful goals is one of the key contributors to happiness and life success.
And for most of us, achieving our goals requires changes of some sort or other.
So if you’re trying to make changes for happiness and/or if you’re trying to develop new positive habits then keep reading…
via TED Ideas by B J Fogg
It doesn’t take 21 days to wire in a habit, says psychologist BJ Fogg. Sometimes, all you need is a shot of positive feeling and emotion, a dose of celebration. Celebrating is a great way to reinforce small changes — and pave the way for big successes.
Psychologist BJ Fogg is the founder and director of the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford University — he’s coached over 40,000 people in his behavior change methods and influenced countless more. His Tiny Habits method states that a new behavior happens when three elements come together: motivation, ability and a prompt.
If we really want to make lasting changes in our lives, Fogg believes we need to break them down into specific, easy behaviors (what he calls Tiny Habits), and find ways to trigger and reward them. Taking 30 seconds or less, a Tiny Habit is fast, simple and will grow For example, instead of having “get in shape” as a vague and intimidating goal, do two push-ups every time you make your morning coffee — that’s your Tiny Habit. After a while, you can increase the number of push-ups and expand into different exercises.
In working with thousands of people, Fogg has found one thing really helps fledgling habits to stick: Celebrating them. Here, he explains how the power of celebration can wire new behaviors into our lives — and make us feel great in the process.
Linda had a postcard taped on her fridge next to her kids’ finger-painted masterpieces. It was a black-and-white illustration of a 1950s housewife talking on the phone. Above the woman’s perfectly coiffed head was a talk bubble: “If the kids are alive at five o’clock, I’ve done my job.”
When Linda saw it, she laughed out loud. It made her smile, then it made her think. It represented an attitude of self-acceptance that she badly wanted but felt was too difficult to adopt.
Linda was a full-time stay-at-home mom with six kids under the age of 13. She loved being home and wouldn’t have had it any other way, yet she felt constantly underwater and overwhelmed. Unlike the woman on the postcard, Linda’s every thought at the end of the day was about all the things she didn’t get done or had done badly: the Cheerios on the back seat of the car (“I should have vacuumed it”); the dirty plates in the sink (“I should have washed them; my mom would never left them”); her son’s face falling after she snapped at him for teasing his sister (“I should be more patient”), and so on.
In my research, I’ve found that adults have many ways to tell themselves “I did a bad job” and very few ways of saying “I did a good job.” Like Linda, we rarely recognize our successes and feel good about our accomplishments. We focus only on our shortcomings as we scamper through our days and trudge through our years.
I want to show you how to gain a superpower — the ability to feel good at any given moment — and use this superpower to transform your habits and, ultimately, your life. Feeling good is a vital part of the Tiny Habits method. You can create this good feeling by using a technique I call “celebration.” When you celebrate, you create a positive feeling inside yourself on demand. This good feeling wires the new habit into your brain. Celebration is both a specific technique for behavior change and a psychological frame shift…
…keep reading the full & original article HERE