Atomic Habits by James Clear – book review by Sean Hearne
Whether you play football, volleyball, basketball, soccer, lacrosse, field hockey, swimming or any other sport – one thing is certain; you can only improve by spending time working on your fitness, skills, and strategic awareness. Let’s talk about the things you don’t typically hear from coach.
All coaches want you to improve so you can be a better athlete, and so you can perform better and win in your individual or team sport. What you do not often hear is how to improve when you are not at practice… what you say? What am I supposed to be doing when I’m not at practice?
The best athletes have good habits. Habits may not sound like a sexy topic for the aspiring athlete, but I guarantee you that the athlete that can apply healthy productive habits regularly will excel in sports and life. When it comes to habits there are really only two things to focus on: build and maintain good habits and eliminate bad habits.
One of my favorite books for 2018 is titled Atomic Habits, by James Clear. This book provides guidance on how to break bad behaviors and start good ones. James Clear shares that there is something called a habit loop, which consists of a Cue, a Craving, a Response and a Reward. The cue triggers a craving which drives a response, which in turn drives a response and ultimately a reward. Your whole life is driven by this cycle on some level.
Leverage what you just learned. If you want to develop new habits you must make them obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying. Specifically we want to introduce a positive cue, that creates a “good” craving, the is followed by the desired response… and if we’ve set this up correctly you will get a reward for starting this new habit loop.
Developing a Positive Habit – As an example aimed at improving your diet… if you want to eat more fruits, put them on the table and not in the refrigerator. Put fruits out in the bowl on your table that you actually enjoy eating, so you will eat it. Make it easy and consider the “ease of eating” between a pomegranate and a banana. One is easy to eat, the other takes quite a bit of effort (even though it’s yummy as well). If that banana was satisfying there is a good chance you’ll do it again and start having a repeat habit of eating the banana (and eventually other fruits as you introduce them to the fruit bowl). To support this cycle long term and create a habit you’ll want to buy fruits that you like and constantly put them on display in your fruit bowl. You now have a positive cue, which incites a craving for a food you like, when you eat it (the response), you enjoy the food and your newly improved habit (the reward).
Eliminating a Bad Habit – As an example aimed at eliminating a ‘bad’ habit… let’s pretend you eat a full King Size Snickers bar every day… and you have decided that is not a good habit because you want to feed your body the best nutrition you can for athletic performance. What to do? In order to eliminate that bad habit and make it harder to repeat, you are going to start making it hard for yourself to have access to King Size Snickers every day. Eliminate the cue (stop buying Snickers when you go shopping, and stick only to your approved shopping list item). You have now eliminated the cue, there will be no response when you open the fridge (the Snickers isn’t there), and the response can’t exist (no Snickers to eat) and the reward for the undesired behavior will diminish over time because you aren’t eating Snickers.
Although both changes to eating habit examples are simple in nature, they demonstrate a very powerful method for controlling the cue, craving, response and reward cycle. By taking control of the cues you expose yourself to (even hanging out with the right crows, instead of the wrong crowd) you will find increased power to achieve your desired outcomes.
A few other noteworthy items to touch upon in James Clear’s book are habit stacking, creating a habit tracker template and creating a habits scorecard. Most of us, myself included, have not taken time over the year to write down our habits and label them as either positive or negative. Let’s start with the habit scorecard.
Habits Scorecard – create a simple list of your habits and label them as either positive or negative in terms of helping you control a positive self destiny (achieving your goals). It becomes very clear almost immediately with this self-reflection exercise. The next step is to intentionally support your good habits and start working on decreasing or eliminating habits you don’t want to keep around.
Habit Tracker Template – This is a simple matrix that James Clear created which is genius. It allows you to write down your habits and track them day by day, each month for the year. This tool let’s you see for example if you are routinely washing your new car once a week to help it last as long as possible. You can see if you are getting enough sleep by going to bed on time… and checking your habit tracker log of “going to sleep on time.”
Habit Stacking – This is one of my favorite concepts from James’ book Atomic habits. Habit stacking is the concept that enables you to build upon existing habits and further strengthen your ability to follow through. To quote James Clear, “Habit stacking is a special form of implementation intention. Rather than pairing your new habit with a particular time and location, you pair it with a current habit. This method, which was created by BJ Fogg as part of his Tiny Habits program, can be used to design an obvious cue for nearly any habit.” The example James provides reads like this: After / Before [Current Habit,] I will [New Habit.] Example – After I put on my running shoes, I will text a friend or family members and let them know where I am running and how long it will take. Another example from me this time: After I get home from school, I will immediately get a snack and prepare my workout clothes/bag, so that I am ready when my ride comes to pick me up and take me to practice. Habit stacking is very powerful because you get to ride the wave of something you already do and add a desired additional habit to it. (Lofty goal for parents, “after my kids eat they immediately wash their dishes and put them int he dishwasher to earn their allowance.)
This is a great book and I highly recommend it. Here is a link to the book on Amazon. Atomic Habits, by James Clear.