As many as 50% of people make resolutions, but 80% of new year’s resolutions fail in the first month of the year. To set myself up to be part of the 20% that succeed in my #2021 goals, I went looking for ways to create behavior change for myself! I found the Fogg Behavior Model from the Stanford Behavior Design Lab and I wanted to share the model in hopes of arming you with 3 elements to improve your chances of reaching your #2021 goals.
So what are the 3 elements?
- #Motivation: you need the motivation to do the behavior you want
- #Ability: you need the ability to do the behavior, aka the behavior is not too much effort
- #Prompt: you need a prompt to get you into the behavior
How it all comes together is making simple behaviors that are easy to do, setting time slots or action points to do that simple behavior, and then lots of positive reinforcement!
Here is an example, if your new year’s goal is to write a book, that’s a really daunting task; but a simple behavior you can do every day (or on weekends) is write 300 words. You can prompt yourself after waking up or before going to bed to allocate 30mins to an hour of sitting down and writing. Once you finish those 300 words, have a treat to reward yourself (I reward myself with watermelons).
Thinking about it in these terms at first, I personally thought well that’s only going to give me 300 words, not necessarily a great book. Then I remembered the quote “Rome wasn’t built in a day, but they were laying bricks every hour.” Those 300 words are you laying down your bricks and building the habit to reach your end goal. I hope this can be of help and that with #motivation, #ability, and a #prompt in mind you can join the 20% of people who see their resolution come true in 2021.