Most of us want to make positive changes in our lives, but we often find it difficult to make these good intentions stick in the long term. We start new habits, expecting to fail, and slip back into our old ways.

There are countless reasons why we fail to make a new habits stick, but the main one is that we simply make them too difficult for ourselves to follow.

Remove Friction

We need to make our habits as easy as possible to accomplish if we are to give ourselves the best possible chance of making them become a genuine part of our routine and our life.

To succeed, make it as easy as possible, and track how often you achieve your goal.

If you want to exercise more, for example, lay out your gear the night before, prepare a bottle of water and do whatever you need to do in advance.

When the time comes to practice the habit, you’ll be ready to go and have no excuses.

Track your success

Tracking gives you a basemark to measure your progress against, and is a positive and effective way to keep yourself motivated. Seeing the progress you are making in a visible way is extremely motivating, and the mind doesn’t like to break patterns, so you’ll be compelled to complete your habit each day.

Chain your habits

Another great trick for introducing multiple habits into your life is to chain them together. So if you always go out to buy a sandwich at lunch time, you could add more exercise by linking a little walk with the journey outside.

Try to find regular habits that you already complete in your routine, and then bolt on your new habits to those. After you’ve cleaned your teeth, taken a shower, made a coffee… these are all good anchors to build new habits onto.

Adding multiple habits

If you’re trying to introduce more than one habit into your routine, a great way to combine them is to link them together, so when you finish the first habit you go straight into the second one and so on.

This way, a series of positive habits essentially becomes one big habit. 

Get our free habit tracker – free until the end of January!

To give you a hand with tracking your habits, we’ve created a simple and free interactive habit tracker:

Download your free habit tracker here.

Add the tracker to your basket, and you just need to enter your email to check out.

Then you can download it to use it freely – digitally, or printed off.

If you do print it off, be sure to leave it somewhere where other people can see it – this will increase your accountability. Write your three goals for the month, whether it’s drinking more water, taking exercise, or playing piano.

Or you can use it on your computer if you save it, type directly into it and tick off the boxes. Be sure to save it every time you update it.

You can then tick off the boxes every time you take a step forward with your habits.

It’s a simple, and visual way to track your habits, and a great way to stay motivated.

Let us know what you think, and good luck!