A fellow coach once shared an anecdote and it has stayed with me over the years. He said that he was hosting Marshall Goldsmith in India and traveling in a car from location and location together. Every day at the same time, a person would call Marshall. It would be a very brief call; he would listen for a minute and then say yes or no and hang up. After this happened a few times, my colleague asked Marshall about this call. Marshall told him that he was creating a new habit and he was paying a person to call him every day at the same time to serve as an accountability partner and a reminder!
It is clear that even a master coach knows and uses the habit tracking to stay on course. This idea of tracking a habit continuously – every hour, every day – to make it a long-lasting part of one’s personal and professional life is now commonplace understanding for coaches, and their clients. In fact, most people who get coached will surely bring up habit forming or habit breaking as a coaching topic – a habit of working out, eating a certain way, drinking enough water, sleeping at a time, waking up at a time, giving up smoking, doing away with sugar or processed food, etc. Rare is the client who does not use a habit tracker in some form or another!
Habit tracking has so much potential for adaptation and evolution. And I have put into practice a tool that brings together the power of tracking with 2 other equally simple and powerful concepts. Here is the first one: the 1% Rule! In the last years, I have been deeply impressed by the Principle of Aggregate Marginal Gains or the 1% Improvement Rule made famous by the coach of the British Cycling Team, David Brailsford. The concept: make a small improvement every day and over a period of time, the cumulative effect is significant! James Clear speaks about Brailsford’s work in his book, Atomic Habits and shares details about how the British Cycling Team was metamorphized into a winning unit in 2003 by 1% improvements in each and every (big and small) aspect of cycling. The team under Brailsford looked at the cycle itself part by part, the gear, the processes and the support infrastructure. Relentless focus on making micro-improvements continuously resulted in stupendous success. James Clear writes: “During the ten-year span from 2007 to 2017, British cyclists won 178 world championships and 66 Olympic or Paralympic gold medals and captured 5 Tour de France victories in what is widely regarded as the most successful run in cycling history!”
The third concept is the very famous S curve of development that states that progress begins slow, then accelerates and then settles in a flat line at a sustainable level. This applies almost directly to how habits form and become sustained practices over time.
Putting these three concepts – Habit Tracking, 1% Rule and the S Curve of Development – together I have created a tool called Habit Plus. Imagine that I want to walk 7500 steps daily and create a sustained habit in 90 days. I can create a Walking Plan that tells me how many steps I need to walk every day to reach that goal in a way that includes incremental improvement daily and follows the S curve! PS I suspect that many of the wellness apps have a similar algorithm.
I began by using the tool on myself and have started setting it up for friends and even some clients. It is a rudimentary tool and still full of bugs. Based on usage so far though, it provides data points that allows the user to create a sustainable habit of movement or stillness in 90 days! I will surely take that as a win and maybe in future I might invest the time to sharper Habit Plus into a fully functional application. Stay tuned for updates…you will hear of them right here.
AUTHOR BIO: Kashmira Mody is a Transformation Coach and has been working with clients across domains and geography for 18 years to maximize success and significance powered by value, vision and areas of genius. She brings her prior experience in leadership, manufacturing, project management and technical marketing with AT&T, Lucent Technologies and Airtel to support her clients achieve their coaching goals. As a certified yoga and meditation teacher, wellness is an area of emphasis that is infused in her working models. She lives in Pune with her life partner and is a newbie gardener and scrapbooker.