Inner Transformation: Making Tiny Habits Your Daily Mantra

While change may come from our desire to give a new lease to our life, to increase productivity, to examine and improve our skills or to regain the balance between our professional and private life that has long been sacred, it is not always an easy thing.

Surprisingly, slowing down and slackening off can allow us to leverage our capacity to be better prepared and find new ways to bounce back. Slowing down in order to speed up allows us to focus on ourselves, to take into account the small routine behaviours that may be of great use to us when we make changes.

Looking back at the transformational work we continued to pursue during the pandemic, one may feel humbled, challenged and proud of what was done.

As we reflect on our key take-aways from this uncertain and unsettling time, and the lessons learned from our new team collaboration through digital, I find it helpful and valuable to also consider how the small things can have impact on our professional lives and work-life balance in general.

When I am asked what I have learned personally from our transformation journey, I firmly believe that constancy is key and that small things deliver big results. Just like BJ Fogg shared in his outstanding book, Tiny Habits, it’s the small things that can make a big difference.

Here are my few tiny habits according to BJ Fogg’s scientific-based principles and a few tips to make them count.

Why you need to start tiny?

Relying on motivation to create a habit does not work but when a behaviour shift is tiny, the process of completing the change is so easy, it does not rely on motivation. The behaviour becomes habit and you have made a start on the difference you need.

Capitalising on positive stress, I decided to make a move on integrating new gym exercises into my workout that do not take too much time or demand to much effort. Step by step, I have managed to enhance my exercise routine. I do some of the easier ones between calls, without delaying my day and without having to do a full exercise regime if I don’t have time for that.

Another example is, I particularly like to feel energised in the morning. Hence why I embraced the Wim Hof cold shower as a new habit. It started with a simple first step of only my feet. After I managed to do that without screaming, I extended it and now have it firmly embedded in my routine. As a result, I feel more energised, and my mind and body more alert.

It is the same in business, where change can take time and you start small to create a sustainable effect. We drive transformation and the adoption of new habits one ripple at a time: by having leaders role model the behaviour, soon followed by more individuals on their teams. Through champions, we enable others in our business to embrace a new way of working and the new behaviour becomes normal.

Keep it simple!

To quote BJ Fogg: “Simplicity changes behaviour”.

That is how I apply this philosophy in my personal life. For example, having the book I want to read left on a specific table in my house which means I can find it immediately whenever I have a break and the opportunity to read a few pages. Creating an environment for this to happen is key. That is why I leave the book near the place I want to sit, usually by the window in the kitchen on a perfect sunny day!

This way of thinking also applies to building new habits in business. Aiming for simplicity and more agility guides every decision we make. With our teams, we are trying to adapt to the pace of change in the market, to meet the changing demands of customers. That means reviewing every tool and process, to optimise it and support our teams to be their most agile and competitive in all scenarios and to make it easy on teams to apply in their everyday life at work.

The tiny habits Microsoft has instilled into our team’s work lives support this transformation. These include encouraging everyone to reduce meetings from 30 minutes to 25 or 60 minutes to 45 to get back some time for themselves. Equally, we have encouraged decreasing the frequency of meetings from weekly to monthly and monthly to quarterly, and to keep three days a week free of internal meetings. We’ve also introduced bite-sized up-skilling sessions so individuals can choose to feed their personal growth during their newly acquired free time.

Anchoring with prompts

Experience has shown me that my immediate environment can act as a prompt to reinforce a habit. For instance, I have a box of herbal tea on my desk to remind me to make a drink over the course of a day. It’s what BJ Fogg calls a “self-prompt”.

I like to instil these reminders into my own team meetings, adding a wellbeing note in all of them and ensuring we take time to raise any personal issues around project delivery so we can support one another. We call it a Huddle team meeting. Most importantly, I make sure we stay on-time to enable people to maintain their correct work-life balance. If we’re meeting towards the end of the day for example, I make sure we don’t “eat” into people’s dinner time!

Consistency is also paramount to the process of anchoring a habit into your routine. Hence, right before going to bed, I write down one to three things I want to achieve the next day. It creates this rendezvous moment with myself which is focused yet part of my nightly wind-down.

Celebrating small successes

The most important thing to remember as you build this consistency is try not to break it, as these small habits are fundamental to building the foundations that will enable you to achieve your goals. So, whether it is a new, small gym exercise added into your daily training or a new topic for the team to discuss in the weekly meeting, maintain the frequency as long as it continues to make a significant difference to your wellbeing and work practices.

So what about you? I am curious to know about the tiny habits you have embraced that have successfully enabled transformation in you and your team and would welcome your shares in the comments.