Can you believe it’s the first of March already? Now is a great time to review your resolutions. I want to check in with you regularly since I care and really want 2018 to be the year you are igniting your dreams.

Once we decide on a goal, we then need to work at achieving it every day. This allows us to form habits that help us to gain momentum. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of misinformation out there about habits.

How Long Habits Really Take to Form

There is no one correct answer for how long a habit will take to form because the creation of a habit takes place in phases. The first is the decision, then there is the adjustment period, and finally, there is the time it takes for the habit to become automatic.

The Decision

This is probably the most difficult step in the achievement of a goal. Often we want to dream about achieving rather than deciding to achieve a goal. It’s safer for one thing. Once we decide, we are going to have to put in the effort and risk failure to achieve it.

A good goal is one which has both types of motivation – internal and external. You want your goal to be meaningful to you. And you want your goal to have some measurable means of success so you will know when you’ve achieved it.

Internal Motivation

Sometimes we choose goals and habits that make other people happy.  You should only choose a goal that you want to achieve.  If you lose weight to please someone else, the habit won’t truly stick, and there will be resentment.

If you want to build up a business, you should want to be a success for the joy inside of you, and not to show other people that you aren’t a failure.

That doesn’t mean you ignore wanting to please others. You just want that as a secondary motivation. Keep it positive, and keep it personal.

External Motivation

Every good goal should be specific and measurable. Your goal may be to pay down debt over the next six months by putting an extra $150 in payment every two weeks. You would know your starting point and your expected end point.

Then throughout the six months, you would be able to monitor your progress. If you only paid $100 one week, you would want to find a way to make up the extra $50 over the next few weeks.

Your habit here would be the regular management of your money. You would want to consistently check your balances and monitor your cashflow.

Another goal could be to participate in your first half marathon. Your regular habits would be to train every day for a period of time until you’re confident in your abilities.

Why the 21 Days

How many times have you heard that it takes 21 days to form a habit? Did you ever try and wonder why a habit didn’t stick?

In the 1950’s, Dr. Maxwell Malz was a plastic surgeon who noted that his patents would take approximately 21 days to get used to their new face when they’d see it in the mirror.  Also, he noted that patients who had a limb amputated would take approximately 21 days to adjust to their situation.

He mentioned this in his famous book Psycho-Cybernetics. And this idea of taking 21 days to adjust to a situation grew into the standard that we have been hearing. You must consistently practice something for 21 days and it will magically become a habit.

Except that when we slip up, we feel like failures.

What About 30 Days?

There is a diet called the Whole 30 where you remove many foods like dairy and grains for 30 days as a way of resetting your body. There is something nice about choosing to do something for a month. However, it also won’t have the lasting impact that you want.

I do want to say it’s important to be conscious of your new habits during the adjustment period. One great way to stay on track was used by the comedian Jerry Seinfeld. He committed to writing a certain number of jokes a day every day.

And then he hung a calendar up on his wall. Every day that he wrote ten jokes, he would put a big red X on the date. Jerry Seinfeld was motivated to not break the chain of red X’s on his calendar and would stay up to complete the task before going to bed.

So How Long Does It Take to Make a New Habit?

It takes an average of 66 days for a new behaviour to become a habit. But that’s just an average. Unfortunately, there’s no one right answer for everyone.

Phillippa Lally, a health psychology researcher at University College London, published her findings in the European Journal of Social Psychology.  She had her test subjects choose a new behaviour, and then studied how long it took for each person to get to the point where they were automatically doing it.

She found it took anywhere from 18 days to 254 days. Some people chose more simple habits like drinking a bottle of water with lunch. Others chose more difficult actions like running for 15 minutes before dinner.

So how quickly you make a new habit does come down to the difficulty of the behaviour you want to change.

How to Recommit

Mel Robbins mentioned in the 5 Second Rule how important it is to forgive yourself as a first step. It’s a powerful tool to get out of your own head and back on track to your goals.

Try to phrase the goal as something positive and in the present. For example, if you wish to give up smoking, don’t say “I quit smoking.”  Your affirmation should be “I am a non-smoker.”

You want to have these anchor statements available to help remind yourself of what you’re working to achieve. Repeat them as often as you need to each day to stay on track.

Share you goals and desire for new habits with some trusted friends who will help to keep you committed. Many friends won’t want to play the “bad guy,” so you could come up with a code word or phrase that they could use. An example could be something random like “purple pickle.”

If your trusted friend says that to you, it’s a pattern interrupt to get you to step back and evaluate what you’re doing right now. Then you have the opportunity to make a different choice.

Remember, you’ve already decided your goal. You just need to remember to recommit to achieving it occasionally.

How to Make Adjustments to Goals

As I mentioned, the more difficult the behaviour, the longer it takes to become an automatic habit. Now would be a good time to ask yourself if you have too big of a goal, and if it would be easier to break it down into smaller tasks.

If you want to save money on groceries, a smaller habit could be to meal plan four or five days a week. You could also choose to “shop” from your pantry one day a week. When that becomes automatic, then you could add in more days.

Perhaps you wanted to earn $5000 through direct sales or your side business.  And now it seems overwhelming. You can break it down into smaller steps that you will do consistently every day to move towards that achievement.

Another idea is to release the focus on the actual money, and connect what you want to do with the $5000. Perhaps you want to celebrate a birthday or purchase a holiday. Get out of the way of the Universe to let the magic happen.

One woman I know wanted to have $1000 for a proper honeymoon. She gave up, and the next day won a contest to go to an exclusive resort for three nights with $1500 credit for meals. It was far above what she would have saved had she been focused only on the money.

Denise Duffield Thomas talked in her book Get Rich Lucky Bitch about how she changed her mindset towards gratitude and started winning contests. She was able to attend a conference in Las Vegas, Nevada in the USA that she had only dreamed of going to.  And things kept building up from there.

She then won a life-changing travel competition. She had set her intention to travel and then won the contest to travel the world for six months staying in luxurious resorts for free.

How to Persist When Things Get Tough

Often, when we get off track, it’s caused by fears or we lost the connection to our dream.

Do not get down on yourself if you slip up. Making a mistake a few times has no measurable impact on your long-term success. You will need to forgive yourself and get back on track as soon as possible.

You should be regularly checking in with yourself. Many people spend an hour on Sunday afternoon reviewing their week and evaluating how well things went. Then they plan their upcoming week with a calendar to schedule the most important things. Be honest about how well you’re doing, and be open to making adjustments.

Get rid of the idea of being perfect.

No one is. The best thing we can do is call ourselves works in progress, and continue to make refinements as we continue to grow.

The last suggestion I have is to embrace the idea of long-term and get rid of the idea of a 21-day quick fix. There are no magic buttons or pills. Jim Rohn once said everyone should become a millionaire not for the money but for who you become in the process. When you try to find shortcuts, you only delay becoming the best version of you.

Final Thoughts

Write down your vision every morning and evening in your journal.  Then spend some time quietly connecting to why you want to achieve the goals. Make it as personal as possible so it has deep meaning for you.

I’ve found it best to connect to goals that are achievements or experiences rather than money. The Universe has a way of providing in unusual ways when you get out of it’s way.

Finally, go with small, incremental improvements rather than the pressure of all or nothing.  And embrace how wonderful it feels every day to build up the momentum.