Breaking a habit can be a grueling experience. You can make it fun by rewarding yourself for achieving specific milestones. It’s these “small wins” that will keep you motivated enough to stay the course and ignore temptations.
Small wins act as a progress point on your way to achieving a major goal. For example, say that your main goal is to get out of debt. This can be a daunting and discouraging task because it involves a lot of moving parts. So you decide the first step is to break the bad habit of excessive spending.
You could create a series of small wins like this:
1. Signing up for Mint.com and creating a monthly budget.
2. Completing a 30-day “wait list” for a purchase you’d normally buy on impulse.
3. Building the daily habit of checking Mint to monitor your spending.
4. Paying off the balance of your highest-interest credit card.
5. Paying off the balance of your second-highest-interest credit card.
Each of these milestones is part of the larger goal of minimizing your spending, but they’re broken down into manageable steps. Each also represents an achievement you can (and should) celebrate.
Now, the most important aspect of small wins is to avoid any incentive that’s directly related to the activity you’re trying to eliminate.
For instance, let’s say you are trying to lose weight. Every time you meet a weekly weight-loss goal, you can treat yourself to a movie or a small shopping spree, but you’ll want to avoid the all-you-can-eat buffet at Golden Corral.
Small wins make you feel like you’re accomplishing something. If you focus too much on the habit you’re trying to break, you’ll never feel like you’re making progress. By focusing on small wins, you’ll have the motivation to keep going when you experience those moments of temptation.
CASE STUDY
Building the cellphone sabbatical habit was in itself part of a larger goal to improve my work-life balance. While I love being self-employed, it’s often hard to turn off my entrepreneurial thoughts when I’m supposed to be relaxing.
So when I successfully built this one habit, I celebrated it with a nice dinner with my fiancée. I’ll also admit that I took some guilty pleasure in watching a couple nearby who paid more attention to their phones than to each other.