The biggest mistake a client makes when trying to make a change is to try to implement wholesale, reset from the top to bottom. Bill Gates once said, “Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in a decade.” What that means is that they get bigger, but do it in a reasonable time frame. A complete change overnight is not realistic. And your lack of progress towards your goals will discourage you. When participants in my workshop analyzed their time portfolio, many people found that they were timebrokes and were calm rather than important goals, focusing on less productive and meaningful activities. As hard-charged type A, they quickly resolve to detoxify from all their devices, shape their bodies with tough daily training and catch up with past commitments overnight. They aim to ingest new macro habits in one giant chunk. Obviously, if it was just as easy as that, they would have already reached these objectives. But change doesn't work that way. The crash diet may narrow us down to dresses and tuxedos next week, but the survey shows that 70-90% of people will quickly earn pounds. It requires real, lasting changes, not a cycle of spikes and crashes.
Enter your micro habits.
Micro habits are big habits that are divided into ridiculously small steps. They are components of new macro habits. Essentially, habits that create habits. Two important ingredients for microhabits are:
1. I'll do it every day
2. Please make it smaller
that's it. Because every day you are chopping up new neural pathways that form only repetitive repetition. Because they are small enough to pass our defense system and start inoculating us from change resistance.
This little first step should take less than a minute or two to complete. I would encourage clients to think of this as a limbo contest. How low can it be? Lower the bar for the size of a new habit and laugh loudly until it gets very low. I want to run a marathon in a better shape, but is Netflix Binge the only marathon you're currently involved in? Start by establishing a micro-master of wearing sneakers once a day and going up and down the stairs on the front pouch. Are you aiming to clean up a nasty closet? Start by folding one sweater. Want to start practicing meditation? Start with one mindful breath. It sounds ridiculous, but it works.
Here are some real life examples from my client:
- After receiving particularly inspiring feedback in his 360 about tuning in a meeting if the topic didn't apply directly to his department, Haoyu established the goal of listening better. His micro-habit was to attend one meeting every day without a device.
- To ease the impulse of her rescuer, Inge committed to her goal of asking someone else for ideas on how to solve the problem, rather than diving in a superhero cape flying.
- Joseph promised to read one paragraph in industry publications every night, in order to keep up with industry news and bypass his “do it completely or not at all” hurdle.
- Morgan's micro-habit was a chronic yes-seayer who wanted to miss something, and responded once a day with “Think about it and come back to you.”
- To alleviate the fast response of lightning that was causing misunderstanding and instead become more intentional, Andrea has established a daily morning habit of writing out one important issue she needs to tackle that day before checking requests from others before checking the phone that day.
With low stakes, micro-habits are a safe experiment. They can see what happens if you break the habit loop and get out of your comfort zone. Did the sky fall if you said no to one invitation? If you didn't check your email during one meeting, have you missed an emergency?
The low-micro habit nature of stakes enhances our resilience. Building resilience by recovering from failure. Fall, stand up, repeat: it is the process of establishing a better adaptive response to pressure. It is also a way of learning how to walk when you are young. Did we give up and tell ourselves that it was a failure because we fell? We probably laughed and tried again. This is the same as building muscle tissue now. Stronger equipped equipment recovers to stress the muscles, create small tears in the fibers, and then lift heavier weights. The process of recovering from the disorder builds the prefrontal cortex. This is an area associated with emotions and decision-making, running down the amygdala. This causes combat or flight responsiveness. So failure is not necessarily a bad thing. Sociologist Dr. Christine Carter says it's hard to feel good about adopting new habits unless we're willing to do bad things at first. With micro habits, we fail small and recover more easily.
Clients often laugh when they introduce micro-habit practices. They raise their eyebrows and say, “But Sabina, this is ridiculous. You can't do just one push-up in a day!” That's when you know they've identified true micro-habits. If you feel that is totally ridiculous, you are on the target. Try this process now:
1. Think about the goals you want to achieve. It's anything professional or personal.
2. Next, think about one step you can take to make progress.
3. Please stop immediately.
4. Next, halve the size of that step, then slash again to reduce it a little.
5. Rather than it takes to do that, continue until it takes almost effort to write out your micro habits. You might laugh at the magnitude of this new habit. If you think it's too much to like to share with anyone, you're there.
6. Try it every day now.
To truly micro with your new habits is to improve the odds you stick to. Because the only thing that is ridiculous than this small habit is because it has not achieved such a small task. However, the impact of these small tasks quickly adds to it. As author and columnist Arianna Huffington puts it, “By making very small changes, you have the power to change your life.”
Pro Tips for Successful Micro Habits
1. Change the scenery. Exchange venues have been proven to improve your chances of success by changing your habits. Outside of our normal environment, our brains are cut off from autowiring. A contextual cues for familiar environments are automated habit triggers. I rarely eat peanut M&Ms except when I go to the theatre, but when I sit down before the show starts, I can't think of anything other than crunchy, colorful candies, that means “contextual cue.” Practice this tip and physically move out of the space where normal behaviors will be played and new behaviors to practice micro habits. For example, your micro habits are to reduce the time you spend scrolling your phone, and in general you do it while eating lunch at your desk, sit in the cafeteria at lunchtime and talk to someone instead.
2. Return the habit to the pig. Creates a new context queue by linking microhabits to existing routines. Learn one new word in a foreign language while brushing your teeth. Drink your morning coffee and write about your strategic intentions for the day. Take your train and go home and do one paragraph of you.
3. I'll track it down. Once you have completed your micro habits for the day, make a physical note of their completion.
4. Stay smaller than you need to. Stabilize at least 4 weeks to fully generate habits before declaring victory and increasing the size of new activities. If it's too fast to reach, it will fail more easily and give up on the next day. Productive failure is one thing. Setting yourself for futility is another. Look forward to the next day. Instead of feeling too discouraged to tackle something that made you feel sick the day before, get excited to pick up where you left off. At some point in my micro-habit journey, many of my uber-suited clients fail because they try to get too fast from micro to medium macros. If you are in this situation, go back to your original micro-sized habit.
5. If it's not successful, it's smaller. Slash and then slash again. The smaller the habit, the more likely you will be to stick to it and build stamina to continue. Again, if you feel it's ridiculous to you, remember that ridiculously small changes are better than they're not at all.
Excerpt from You are the boss By Sabina Nawaz. Copyright 2025© by Sabina Nawaz. Simon & Schuster, reprinted with permission from LLC
