Are your good habits helping you or handcuffing you?

Last week, I was sitting in the garden with my husband, enjoying the sunshine and the bird song, when he suddenly realised he hadn’t done his morning 15 minutes-session of Duolingo. For those of you unfamiliar with the language app with the green owl logo, Duolingo offers you double points for your evening session if you complete a session between 6am and noon and double points for the following morning’s session when you complete a session between 6pm and midnight. Martin was initially frustrated that he’d simply forgotten to do it and would miss out on his double points before laughing it off as pretty unimportant in the scheme of things.

Our Duolingo practice began back in the days of Lockdown and it soon became a daily routine. Last year, we decided that we both had an unnecessary compulsion to take part in the public leagues when we noticed that we spent Sunday evenings frantically working through lessons to gain extra points to keep us in the top ten of the Diamond League – there’s no real benefit to this, it’s just a competition. We made our profiles private, left the leagues and compete only against our own performance.

It’s a habit – and for the most part, it’s a good habit. However, as we discussed Duolingo in the garden last week, I heard myself say ‘habits shouldn’t become handcuffs’. (Obviously, I immediately filed that phrase away in my mind for a blog post!)

What did I mean by that? Simply that our habits, however useful/fun/laudable they are, shouldn’t hold us back or get in our way.

It’s great to get into a routine and to make time and space for learning or developing. Developing habits which are physically, mentally or emotionally healthy is really important. Noticing when those habits might be becoming a little too inflexible is also important.

Jon Acuff, the author of Finish: give yourself the gift of done, wrote:

‘This is the first lie that perfectionism tells you about goals: Quit if it isn’t perfect.’

Perfectionism with regard to our habits could cause any one of us to give up on our goals when we decide to go to a birthday dinner instead of the gym, or we grab another 30 minutes of sleep after a disturbed night instead of being at our laptop an hour before the rest of the team log on. Losing our 1000-day streak on Duolingo because we were ill or travelling or just forgot isn’t a catastrophe – it’s just a glitch. We can start again tomorrow. Don’t let’s quit because it’s not perfect.

It’s also possible that you may feel you want to step back from some habits which no longer work for you. Maybe you started to write morning pages at the beginning of the year to help you work through some tricky times at work: it really helped but now the situation has resolved and it’s not such a useful practice. Maybe cut the practice down to every other day. See how you feel. If you want to, start doing them every day: by the same token, you may decide to give up morning pages completely.

Perhaps when you first took over leading your team, you issued a report every Friday afternoon to make sure everyone was kept informed, issues were addressed, successes were celebrated. The team has changed now – is this still a useful and relevant practice? How could you adapt it for it to be useful rather than a hindrance?

Back in the 1800s, US politician, education reformer and slavery abolitionist, Horace Mann wrote:

‘Habit is a cable; we weave a thread of it each day, and at last we cannot break it.’

I think this is a great illustration of how habits are built up day by day, each repetition strengthening the last. It’s also a good reminder that if we want to break a habit, it may not be possible to simply snap that cable instantly: we may need to undo them, thread by thread.

Today’s pebble for you to ponder: are your good habits helping you or handcuffing you?

Michelle

Turning over pebbles is the blog of Thinking Space Coaching

If you’re interested in working on your leadership behaviours and making the most of your potential, please do email me and let’s have a conversation about how we can work together.