Growing your seed habit

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Now that we’re into 2019, how are your New Year’s resolutions going? If they’re going well, that’s fantastic, if they’re already starting to fade, though, you are not alone.
According to some publications, about 80% of New Year’s resolutions are forgotten by February. Each progressive failure to implement a lasting resolution can become a scar that may demotivate you from trying again the following year.
If this rings true to you, we suggest trying instead to plant what Osmosis’s co-founder & CEO, Shiv, calls a “seed habit.” The general idea is to pick ONE habit to focus on and once it’s firmly rooted in your daily life adding other habits on top of that.
You can think of this as growing a tree from a single seed. Just like how a seed grows roots and a trunk that acts as a foundation for branches, a seed habit can be the foundation that branches off into other desired habits.
For example, Shiv made a seed habit of lifting weights. Over the next few months, this habit then branched off into healthier eating habits to support his efforts in the gym, a habit of getting up consistently early in the morning to be more productive, a habit of listening to audiobooks while at the gym, and finally a habit of meditation because of what he learned while listening to those audio books.
Clearly, that one habit of sticking to a weightlifting routine has branched off to developing habits that have improved other areas of his personal and professional life.
So what are effective strategies for growing a seed habit? First, focus on only one habit at a time, no matter how motivated you are to work on other habits.
Remember you are limited by finite resources like time, willpower, and money, so it’s better to focus and achieve one thing than it is to fail at two or more things.
Second, understand behavior change. One instructive model was developed by BJ Fogg, it describes behavior as a function of three variables: motivation, ability, and prompts (B = MAP).
You need a certain amount of motivation and ability for prompts to succeed in triggering a behavior. One insightful thing you can take from this model is that instead of focusing on motivation, which can be fickle, it’s often useful to focus on improving ability.
Improving ability can be something like sleeping in your workout clothes to make it easier to work out first thing in the morning.
Third, focus more on the process than the outcome. Our attachments to the outcome is the source of much of our discontent.
Even if we achieve the desired outcome, the satisfaction from that achievement is fleeting as you think of the next goal you’d like to accomplish.
Instead, it’s better to focus on and find satisfaction in the process which will be with you in the long-term and will help you achieve your desired outcomes.
Fourth, make your habit measureable. Many resolutions fail because they are too vague.
For example, if you tell yourself that you are going to lose weight by eating healthier, you may be setting yourself up for failure because ‘eating healthier’ is ambiguous.
Instead, it is better to develop defined habit like tracking daily calorie consumption and maintaining a 20% deficit. Fifth, choose a specific milestone.
While we do recommend to focus more on the process than on the outcome, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have checkpoints in mind.
Used correctly, these can be highly motivating and enable you to chip away at what may otherwise be an intimidating goal.
For example, if your goal is to read 12 books in six months, that means you should have read two books by the end of the first month.
If you haven’t, you may need to reassess your seed habit of carving out time daily to read. Sixth, build momentum early.
New Year’s resolutions allow you to procrastinate on your goals until the beginning of the year. That also puts a lot of pressure on getting the first week of January just right, and a lot of emphasis on your failure if the resolution doesn’t stick.
Why wait? Start a seed habit whenever you like!
It's like ripping off a bandaid on "2" instead of waiting till "3" Seventh, Find an accountability buddy. Related to the BJ Fogg Model for behavior change, an accountability buddy, or better yet a whole group, can provide you extra motivation as you don’t want to let them down.
Eighth, pay for it. We tend to value and use things that we pay for more than what we receive for free.
So, if there is a specific membership, service, or app that you will help you achieve your goal, it’s worth paying for that aide simply because you are more likely to use it.
Similarly, you can use so-called “loss-aversion” techniques to motivate your behavior change. An example of this you could try betting a friend $100 that you are going to finish a half-marathon this year.
Because you don’t want to lose that money you are more likely to follow through on your goal. All right, as a quick recap … In order to successfully germinate, organic seeds require a combination of factors such as water, sunshine, nutrients, and persistence.
Similarly your seed habit may be more successful if you implement one or more of the strategies above. Now what are you waiting for?
Get growing! Thanks for watching.
This video was adapted from the articles “Ditch Your New Year's Resolutions. Instead, Plant Your Seed Habit” and “8 Strategies For Cultivating Your Seed Habit” we recently published in Forbes.
Links to those articles are in the description.