Three Key Habits To Elevate Your Coaching Impact

The Science of Habit Building

 There’s a lot of nonsense about building habits out there in the world, the most pernicious and probably least accurate being “do something for 21 days and you build a new habit.” (The reality is that you'll START to build a habit in 21 days)

This explains why your New Year’s Resolutions are so depressing and elusive (“This
year, once again, I pledge to eat less, exercise more, learn a new language, love my kids, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.")

And also why January 21st is considered one of the most depressing days of the year. (Not only are your resolutions broken, but you just received December’s credit card bill…)

 The good news is that in the last few years, there has been some deeply practical work done on what actually builds habits, based on research and neuroscience.

There is a simple and powerful formula for how to define and embed a new habit you want to develop. The formula draws deeply from the thinking of two writers in particular, Charles Duhigg and BJ Fogg.

Charles Duhigg is a NY Times journalist, which explains why in The Power of Habit he’s written a book that (unlike most business books) is actually engaging, practical and full of good stories and science.

One of Duhigg’s key findings is that a habit is not simply a behavior, but rather a three-part system which he calls the habit loop: a trigger (the situation that sets it off); the behavior; and the reward (why your brain says: next time, do this again.)

Understanding what you get from the old habit you’re seeking to replace – the reward – matters, because you’ve got to ensure that you get something similar or better from the new habit you want to develop.

And becoming very clear on the circumstances that trigger the old habit is critical, or else you’re always going to find yourself half way through a tub of Haagan-Dazs Macadamia Crunch ice cream wondering, yet again, how did this just happen…

The second writer is BJ Fogg, an academic at Stanford where he is Director of the Persuasive Technology Lab and is also creator of the TinyHabits.com website.

BJ has focused deeply on how to change human behavior, and one of his most powerful contributions is a simple solution to how we can stop sabotaging our own best efforts to build new habits.

 His insight is that as soon as we create a broad habit – let’s say, going for a run in the morning – our big brains immediately start finding ways to “hack” our well-meaning plan. It doesn’t take much, as you’re lying in your warm bed, to think of all those excellent reasons why today (just today, tomorrow I’ll be good I promise) you can’t go for that run.

Fogg says that the secret is to define a first step that takes less than sixty seconds to do.

 This aligns strongly with Getting Things Done productivity guru David Allen’s insight that you can’t do projects, you can only do “the next action.” What Fogg is telling us is that we need to define the first step – the micro-habit – of the larger habit we want to build. Don’t try to build a habit to go for a run in the morning. Build a habit to put on your running shoes as soon as you get out of bed.

The NEW HABIT FORMULA

When you combine some of the key insights from Charles Duhigg’s book together with BJ Fogg’s work, a simple but powerful formula for building new habits begins to emerge.

WHEN THIS HAPPENS…	INSTEAD OF…	I WILL (IN 60 SECONDS OR LESS)…
Identify the triggering event or context. Be as detailed as possible, so you know exactly when it happens and what it looks like.	Articulate the old and default behavior you want to change. For an added bonus, seek to understand the “reward” you get from doing this.	Clarify the micro-habit, a behavior that takes less than a minute to do and is perhaps the first step of a bigger habit.

 Examples

WHEN	INSTEAD OF…	I WILL …
I’m brushing my teeth at night.	ignoring the dental floss and thinking I’ll do it “next time”	floss one tooth. (This is BJ Fogg’s favorite example, with his bigger goal of flossing twice a day)
I get a craving to eat any time after 8:00 PM	finding myself heading to the refrigerator and eating a pint of ice cream	drink a big glass of water (I know thirst often feels like hunger. This stops my ice cream craving.)
I wake up in the morning	turning on my device and checking my email	Meditate for 5 minutes

THE FIRST COACHING HABIT: TRY NOT TO “BE SO HELPFUL”

We are all so keen to help. To jump in. To fix things. To “add value.”

To provide the solution, the answer, the next step.

There is a good reason for that. You have a good heart. You’re genuinely trying to help. And there are times when that’s exactly the right thing to do.

And this is an overdeveloped muscle. As the answer to everything, the default habit for every situation, it’s exhausting and debilitating. 

The new habit is not actually a refusal to help. It’s a process for getting clear on exactly how they’d like you to help, so you can in fact be less busy but more useful.

Someone once defined an adult-to-adult relationship as, “Being able to ask for what you want, knowing the answer may be No.”

That’s much harder to do than it sounds. It’s hard, often, to know what you want.

It’s hard, often, to ask for it. And it’s hard to realize you have a choice to say Yes or No or Maybe when somebody makes a request of you.

 The First Habit is to ask what exactly they want from you before you start providing it. You help them get clear on what they really want. (They don’t often precisely know.)

You stop yourself over-delivering solutions they likely don’t want or need. You break the cycle of overdependence and bottlenecking.

THE FIRST COACHING HABIT: TRY NOT TO “BE SO HELPFUL” (Example)

WHEN …	INSTEAD OF…	I WILL...
Someone seems to need my help	assuming I know what help they need and jumping in with the solution, the answer, the action plan, the next steps …	ask them, “How can I help?”

THE SECOND COACHING HABIT: SLOW DOWN THE ADVICE MONSTER

As someone starts describing a problem to you, even though you don’t really know them, or the other party, or most of the details of what’s going on, or any of the context … you’re pretty sure you know exactly what they need to do.

Welcome to The Advice Monster.

It lives within us all. And it probably wouldn’t be a bad intervention to have most of us sitting around a circle and admitting our addiction, saying things like, “Hi, my name is Peter, and I’m an Advice Giver.”

 Not that advice is always a bad thing to offer up.

But the Second Habit is all about slowing the rush to offer up your ideas. If you can delay that “You should …” or “Have you thought of …?” moment by even a minute, your impact as a manager and a leader changes.

 Your goal is simply to hear their ideas first.

 People will almost always show up with some initial thoughts and ideas to solve the challenge they’re wrestling with. You’ll be surprised and delighted at how often your
job will be to simply agree with the idea they have and to encourage them to do it. And they’ll be surprised and delighted at how smart and empowered you make them feel.

THE SECOND COACHING HABIT: SLOW DOWN THE ADVICE MONSTER (Example)

WHEN …	INSTEAD OF…	I WILL...
someone asks me “how do I...?”	telling them exactly how to do it…	ask them, “That’s a great question and I’ve got some ideas which I’ll tell you … but let me ask you, what are your first thoughts on how to do that?”

THE THIRD COACHING HABIT: CREATE THE LEARNING MOMENT

Of the very many definitions of coaching that exist in the world, one of the most powerful comes from Sir John Whitmore’s groundbreaking book Coaching for Performance, in which he says coaching is, "unlocking a person's potential to maximize their own performance. Helping them to learn rather than teaching them.”

As a manager and a leader, your job is to help them learn.

 Unfortunately, people don’t learn when you tell them something.

They don’t even learn when they do something.

 People only really start to learn when they reflect back on what just happened and ask themselves, “What did I learn just now?”

 Winston Churchill once said, [people] “occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.” That’s true of learning moments as well. We’re so busy just trying to do stuff that we miss the opportunity to learn all the time.

 The Third Habit changes that.

 It creates a brief moment at the end of any conversation, a private “one on one”, a public team meeting, and everything in between, to articulate what was useful, what was valuable, what needs to be learned.

 The Third Habit creates the A-ha! Moment for them.

 That helps you, as it tells you what’s working (and what’s not) so you can do more of that the next time.

THE THIRD COACHING HABIT: CREATE THE LEARNING MOMENT (Example)

WHEN …	INSTEAD OF…	I WILL...
I finish a meeting, whether it’s one to one or with a group, whether it’s internal or with external partners…	wrapping things up and hustling on to the next thing in your calendar…	ask them, “What was most valuable for you from this meeting?”

MAKE THIS YOUR LEARNING MOMENT

At Smart Development, we see the impact of coaching as a simple and powerful cycle: insight leads to behavior change leads to positive impact.


 Let’s practice what we preach. Before you go, let me ask you this:

 WHAT WAS MOST USEFUL OR MOST VALUABLE ABOUT THIS POST?

 WHAT WERE YOUR KEY INSIGHTS?

 WHAT WILL YOU NOW DO BETTER OR DIFFERENTLY?

To your greater success and fulfillment,

Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant
SMART DEVELOPMENT

 

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