The Path To Focus: Mould Your Identity With Habit Modelling
Have you ever looked at a certain type of person and thought, I want to be like that? Maybe you want to be a more productive person, or maybe you want to be more adventurous, or perhaps more social. Maybe even you have tried quizzing someone who has the traits that you would like and asked them how come they are like that. Chances are they answered:
I dunno, I just am.
Well today I’d like to share with you a very powerful technique that I’ve been using on myself in a self-experiment over the last couple of weeks. It is so simple, yet so effective that I had to get this one into my Path To Focus series and share it with you as soon as possible. So sit back, relax, and find out how to become the person you want to be.
The Born Identity
Before we get to the technique, let us first explore what identity means. When you were first born, contrary to what your parents said, you did not have a personality or in fact any kind of identity. Of course contained within you is genetic information that make you look a certain way, and to some degree the way you behaviour is predetermined by genetics.
However DNA is fluid and is somewhat shaped by our environments, your identity, the person you are, is shaped by the habits you partake in within that environment. If your identity is that of a studious scholar, it is because of your habits surrounding reading books, learning and hanging out with other academics.
If you are an alcoholic it is because of your habits of going to bars, buying alcohol from the supermarket, and hanging out with other alcoholics. Your identity is born from your habits, not – as is so often misconstrued – the other way around.
It is very important you get on board with that, and understand quickly that it is your habits that shape your identity. You are who you are because of all the things you habitually do, many of which you do automatically with little to no thought.
So if you want to change who you are, you have to change your habits. If you are a recluse and you want to be an outgoing party animal, you have to get into the habit of going out more. If you are an alcoholic and you want to stop, you have to get into the habit of drinking non-alcoholic drinks.
You are your habits.
Habit Modelling
For a long time I have wanted to be a tidier person, every now and again I made what I saw as concerted efforts to become the tidy individual that I wanted to be, always to no avail. Recently I read Atomic Habits by James Clear, and it was there that I came across the notion that your habits are where your identity is born, whereas before I thought that people had habits because of their identity.
I had simply been confusing personality, which is the predisposition that your genetics give you, with identity, which is the manifestation of your actions. Anyway, I realised after reading, that I would try something I like to call habit modelling, this is simply whereby you study the type of person you want to be, and you write down all the things that kind of person does.
I then printed up the rules and stuck them all over the house, that way as I’m about to leave my plates on the side after a meal, I can see that tidy people don’t do that, they clear away their plates after meals.
When I take the washing out of the machine and I think to myself, I’ll fold that later, I see a note on the wall that tells me that tidy people fold and put away the washing immediately.
The beauty with habit modelling is you can do it with almost anything, all you have to do is work out the common habits of the person you are trying to model. So you may want to be more productive, in that case your list might start like this:
Productive people plan out their days in advance
Productive people use calendars or phone apps to track their work progress.
Productive people spend at least two hours a day off the grid, with no phone or internet.
Productive people break down big tasks into manageable bit sized chunks.
…and so on.
Once you have your list, you print it out, make it a wallpaper on your desktop, or whatever format you prefer, as long as you catch sight of that list many times per day. If you don’t know what productive people do, find one and ask! Tell her or him that you are compiling a list, read them the first few lines and then see what they say.
To make the list easier to read it is a good idea to break it down into sections, for example my tidy list is broken down into what a tidy person does in each room of the house, as well as a general section that applies to anywhere, you can have a look at that below.
Here’s an example of how you might use that technique in the area of productivity:
Phones –
Productive people do not have lots of games on their phones.
Productive people have apps on their phones that aid they’re productivity.
Productive people use calendar apps to structure their working day.
Productive people do not leave their phones on all the time.
Productive people do not have their phones on them whilst working.
Planning –
Productive people spend some time at the end of each day going over plans for the next day.
Productive people use a portion of Sunday evening to plan their week ahead.
Productive people do not have unstructured meetings.
Productive people have as few meetings as possible.
Working –
Productive people arrange it so they can work without distraction.
Productive people know what they are going to be working on from one minute to the next.
Productive people break down work into chunks of activity interspersed with smaller periods of rest.
Personal –
Productive people tend to meditate.
Productive people do not watch much T.V.
By breaking down the list this way you can easily map what you are doing at any given time onto your habit model. The beauty of this technique is your sections are determined by what you already do, so whatever situation you find yourself in, you can ask yourself how the person you are trying to habit model would do it. In other words:
How would [insert type of person] do [this activity] in [this situation]?
Or
*What would [insert type of person] act like in [this situation]?
After a while you’ll build up an extensive list of habits, of whomsoever you want to emulate. The amazing thing is because you are not saying to yourself directly, I should be acting like this in this situation, or I need to get rid of that particular habit, it is like you are changing by stealth. You make the simple statement that you want to be the type of person you are modelling, and then you look at what that person does:
I want to be a tidier person, this is what tidy people do.
Cognition Recognition
The reason this technique works so well is because of a couple of cognitive biases that exist in the human psyche. The first is cognitive dissonance, this is the psychological state whereby the brain does not like to hold two conflicting stories within itself. So if you say to yourself a few times a day that you want to be a certain person, and then remind yourself what that type of person does, your subconscious starts doing somersaults if you are not behaving in a manner that befits that type of person.
Secondly we are hard wired through evolution to avoid being cast as flaky and unreliable, which makes sense for such social creatures as ourselves. This statistic has been proven in a few interesting experiments whereby people are asked to commit to a small concession, and then later agree to a much larger one which they would no way have done so without the first small commitment.
In one experiment in the United States, homeowners were asked to put a huge billboard sign on their front lawns, advising people to drive safely.
Almost everyone asked said no. Then they repeated the experiment, however this time they approached the homeowners a couple of weeks in advance and asked if they wouldn’t mind putting a small driver safety postcard in their windows.
Of course most people said yes to this second offer as it was no great inconvenience. A few weeks later the experimenters approached the homeowners whom had agreed to put postcards in their windows, and asked if they would mind a huge sun-blocking billboard on their front lawns, most of them said yes!
This is because the small postcard in the window was a signal to their subconscious, that they were the type of people who cared about road safety, therefore when asked to put a monstrous sign on their lawns, they felt compelled to act in a congruent manner.
"I guess I should have this huge sign on my lawn, because that's what people who care about road safety would do."
We are using the same psychological tricks in habit modelling, in other words you are using your intellect to control automatic evolutionary responses, something that is done to you on a daily basis by various advertisers and sales people.
Conclusion
Our identities are driven by our habits
If you want to be a certain type of person you have to emulate their habits.
Make a list of the habits of the person you want to be and make that list as visible as possible in your daily life.
Break the list down into manageable sections
Simply declaring that you want to be this type of person, and leaving reminders about what this type of person is like, will slowly change you into them.
Habit modelling hacks into deep rooted evolutionary processes leading to automated responses.
Advertisers and salespeople hack our brains all the time, habit modelling is a form of conscious hacking.
The Path To Focus: The Story So Far:
The Path To Focus: How To Start A New Habit
The Path To Focus: Stacking Your Way To Success
The Path To Focus: Controlling Your Environment
The Path To Focus: Desire Bundling Changing Want To Need
The Path To Focus: Leave Your Goals In The Valley Of Disappointment
WHAT TYPE OF PERSON DO YOU WANT TO BE? HAVE YOU TRIED IN THE PAST TO START UP A SET OF HABITS AND COULDN’T STICK TO IT? WHAT TECHNIQUES DID YOU TRY THEN, AND WILL YOU TRY HABIT MODELLING? OR PERHAPS YOU HAVE YOUR OWN TIPS AND TRICKS AS TO HOW TO BECOME THE PERSON YOU WANT TO BE? AS EVER, LET ME KNOW BELOW!
Title Image: Swapnil Dwivedi on Unsplash