I’ve recently just finished reading the book “Switch, How to Change Things when Change is Hard” By Chip & Dan Heath. I wanted to share a strong take home message I got from this book in regards to habits and how to successfully instill new habits through “Action Triggers”. An Action Trigger has a profound impact to motivate people to do things that they know they need to do, as you are preloading a decision. An Action Trigger may be as simple as ” Tomorrow when I drop my son off to school, I’ll head straight to the gym. In this example I’ve made a decision to execute a certain action (going to the gym to workout) when I encounter a certain situational trigger (the school drop off). Another simple example may be that you have a goal to drink more water throughout the day, by setting your phone alarm to go off every 1 hour it will motivate you to drink water (say 300ml) every time it buzzes. Again it is a decision to execute a certain action (drinking water) when a certain situational trigger (phone alarm) is encountered.
A study has shown that Action Triggers are super successful in helping people achieve hard goals. Action Triggers triple the chance of success with harder goals from 22% to 62%, they aid people in forming new behavioural habits in difficult times. Action Triggers can be unique and highly vary, they are super easy to implement, set a certain action to execute when you encounter a trigger.