When you change a habit, what do you expect to happen?  

How will you judge your own success or failure?  

Have you even thought of what success means to you?

I was recently inspired by Unconditional Parenting, a parenting book.  The author was hammering home some foundational developmental psychology.  

He paused to say, I know that you want practical advice but before I give it to you, I need to provide some foundation.  Even if you’re already on board, I need to give you more justification.  Because , in parenting, like other habits, you are destined to eventually fail. When we fail, we want to fall back to a stronger baseline than your previous.  

This caused the whole idea of habit change to click for me. When you work on a major change, you will eventually undo some of your progress.  And that’s a gentle way of saying you’re destined to fail.  

For example, in 2013, I switched my diet to low carb.

When I say low carb, I don’t mean I cut out some sugar.  I mean that I measured everything that went into my mouth.  I kept my diet below 100 grams carbohydrates per day and zero sugar. It was a massive project with food journals, planning, cooking, and constant effort. 

This is all a past tense description because I don’t eat that way today.  But I actually eat way better today than I ever did before 2013.  Eating low carb didn’t stick but it did lead to a variety of new tools and foundations.  I understand food better.  I know where sugar was hiding in plain sight and I understand how different foods make me feel.

Whenever we work on new habits, it’s very easy to get caught up in  black and white thinking.  The idea that I will either be a success or I will be a failure.  What we forget is that success and failure are not the only options.

We inevitably slide back. But we can slide back to a new raised baseline, a more powerful version of ourselves.  This new baseline won’t be perfection and that’s okay. It’s progress.

Maybe you’re going to run a marathon and you want to see yourself as a runner.  You might run every single day for a while.  When you stop running every single day, you haven’t failed. You can still run. It’s probably a lot easier than it used to be!

This isn’t limited to health habits. Any new habit might slow down from daily, to weekly, or weekly, to monthly. Maybe the intensity shifts, or your commitment to it changes. In everything we do we have a baseline and each habit changes is an opportunity to improve it.

As individuals, teams, and organizations we need to rise above black and white. Habits change over time, and so do our goals. We use these changes to keep raising the baseline.