Book Discussion: Atomic Habits
Week Three - The Four Laws of Behavior Change - A "Simple Set of Rules"
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Caveat
Normally the Tuesday morning coffee discussion is posted later the same day.
This week, our conversation on habits started out fine.
Then it took a hard turn down a rabbit trail that will be the subject of a much longer and deeper dive that will be posted in the Sunday’s Soul section.
Consequently, I realized after working on that piece for several hours, that it needed a lot more thought an attention than I had time for.
Hence, the discussion of James Clear’s Atomic Habits is a day late . . .
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This week, we looked at the framework for behavior change (habits).
In order to dismantle the old and build the new, we must utilize what Clear calls the Fours Laws of habit change: Cue, Craving, Response, Reward:
To break a bad habit, we must:
Make them Invisible (Cue)
Make them Unattractive (Craving)
Make them Difficult (Response)
Make them Unsatisfying (Reward)
Nobody wants to do things that fall into those catagories, right?
Conversely, to build new habits, we must reverse engineer the process.
Make them Obvious (Cue)
Make them Attractive (Craving)
Make them Easy (Response)
Make them Satisfying (Reward)
Common sense, right?
So, why don’t more people figure this out?
ID’d By Our Habits
The short answer is that it’s complicated.
Habits are not just what we do, they have become who we are. We are identified by ourselves (sometimes) and others by the things we do (habits).
That is a sobering thought.
So, be honest - Have you ever given this much thought to how to break old, destructive or unwanted habits and build new ones?
Especially ones that you are identified by?
I once worked with someone who loudly laughed at everything he said and butted into every conversation he was in ear shot of (apparently he had extremely good hearing). Both bad (and very annoying) habits. That was his M.O.
The larger subject of change (transformation) is something I’ve been interested in for a long time. I have been writing about it in the Saturday Soup section of the UnCorked newsletter..
Although there are habits that I constantly deal with and work on changing, I had never thought about in the context of an actual framework on the habit forming level like this.
Actually, like most people, I never gave the subject of habits, which are the atoms (hence the book title) for the larger systems we employ for change (why we do what we do and how we can change), much thought at all.
Overall, I think it boils down to whether we believe the concept that change is even possible.
So it is not even on the radar screen. And even if it is, the process seems too overwhelming.
So, we just stay where we are (in our comfortable misery) and continue to feed our emotional needs with mindless gratifications because it requires minimal effort.
The conversation ranged over differences between good habits, bad habits, addictions, and how we develop or break free from them.
Jesus spoke about this in the parable of an unclean spirit in Matthew 12:43-45.
In this short story, he makes the point that if we do not completely clean house and replace what we get rid of, it will come back even worse than it was.
Those who have dealt with hard core addictions will confirm that in the event of a relapse, the addiction doesn’t go back and start from the beginning, it takes up exactly where it left off and gets worse from there.
In the next part of the book, Clear takes a look at each law individually. We’ll get into those in subsequent weeks.
In the mean time, I highly recommend getting Atomic Habits by James Clear for your own personal study. It may literally change the way you do life.
Until then, friends . . .