WomensLearningStudio

every habit is made up of a cue, a routine and a reward

Duke University researcher in 2006 found that more than 40 percent of the actions people performed each day weren’t the due to decision making, but were habits

But that doesn’t mean that habits are destiny. Habits can be ignored, changed, or replaced. And studies show that simply understanding how habits work — learning the structure of the habit loop — makes them easier to control. Once you break a habit into its components, you can fiddle with the gears.

40% to 45% of what we do every day sort of feels like a decision, but it’s actually habit.

There’s a cue, which is like a trigger for the behavior to start unfolding, A routine, which is the habit itself, the behavior, the automatic sort of doing what you do when you do a habit.

And then at the end, there’s a reward. And the reward is how our neurology learns to encode this pattern for the future.

When our intentional mind is engaged, we act in ways that meet an outcome we desire and typically we're aware of our intentions. Intentions can change quickly because we can make conscious decisions about what we want to do in the future that may be different from the past. However, when the habitual mind is engaged, our habits function largely outside of awareness. We can't easily articulate how we do our habits or why we do them, and they change slowly through repeated experience. "Our minds don't always integrate in the best way possible. Even when you know the right answer, you can't make yourself change the habitual behavior," Wood says.

Forty percent of the time we're not thinking about what we're doing," Wood interjects. "Habits allow us to focus on other things…Willpower is a limited resource, and when it runs out you fall back on habits."

The second principle is remembering that repetition is key.

His new book The Power of Habit explores the science behind why we do what we do — and how companies are now working to use our habit formations to sell and market products to us.

every habit starts with a psychological pattern called a "habit loop," which is a three-part process. First, there's a cue, or trigger,

third step, he says, is the reward: something that your brain likes that helps it remember the "habit loop" in the future.

Step 1: Set Goals by Baselining Your Health

Step 3: Identify Harmful Patterns

Visualizing your desired outcome is a useful tool in your journey. “Seeing” yourself as you wish to be has helped smokers quit, obese people lose weight, and sports champions achieve their goals. In order to change the printout of the body, you must learn to rewrite the software of the mind.

What the researchers found was that at the beginning of the day, a judge was likely to give a favorable ruling about 65 percent of the time. However, as the morning wore on and the judge became drained from making more and more decisions, the likelihood of a criminal getting a favorable ruling steadily dropped to zero.

It didn’t matter what the crime was — murder, rape, theft, embezzlement — a criminal was much more likely to get a favorable response if their parole hearing was scheduled in the morning (or immediately after a food break) than if it was scheduled near the end of a long session.

As it turns out, your willpower is like a muscle. And similar to the muscles in your body, willpower can get fatigued when you use it over and over again. Every time you make a decision, it’s like doing another rep in the gym. And similar to how your muscles get tired at the end of a workout, the strength of your willpower fades as you make more decisions.

Proven Strategies for Better Decision-Making

8.) Avoid Distractions

7.) Take Naps

Goals should be the big picture items that you wish to someday accomplish. Your quotas on the other hand are the minimum amounts of work that you must get done every single day to make it a reality.

Professor Fogg’s entire system on Tiny Habits is built around this principle that it’s better to set micro quotas to get out of the analysis phase and right into the action:

An “Ahscrewit!” moment is any specific instance where you throw your arms up in the air and say, “Screw this, it’s not worth the effort!”

There are programs and services you can use to make sure that you make the most out of your computer. Having a computer desktop that you can navigate quickly and efficiently is fast becoming more important than having a tidy desk.

digital literacy as ‘the ability to find, evaluate, utilize, share, and create content using information technologies and the Internet’6. By this definition, digital skills are any skills related to being digitally literate. Anything from the ability to find out your high-score on Minesweeper to coding a website counts as a digital skill.

What Digital Skills do I Need for the Modern Workplace?

when anyone can be their own publisher, we see more and more examples of poor writing skills both in print and on the web.  Poor writing skills create poor first impressions and many readers will have an immediate negative reaction if they spot a spelling or grammatical mistake

Writing in the Workplace

And digital fluency, the extent to which people embrace and use digital technologies to become more knowledgeable, connected and effective, plays a key role in helping women achieve gender equality and level the playing field.

A new research report from Accenture (NYSE:ACN), Getting to Equal: How Digital is Helping Close the Gender Gap at Work, provides empirical proof that women are using digital skills to gain an edge in preparing for work, finding work and advancing at work. 

“This is a powerful message for all women and girls. Continuously developing and growing your ability to use digital technologies, both at home and in the workplace, has a clear and positive effect at every stage of your career.  And it provides a distinct advantage, as businesses and governments seek to fill the jobs that support today’s growing economy.”

accelerant in every stage of a person’s career—a powerful one in education and in the workplace, and an increasingly important one as they advance into the ranks of leadership.

Digital fluency is helping today’s workers better manage their time and become more productive.

By the way, last week, I launched two peer support groups on Facebook. Nonprofit Happy Hour already has over 1,300 members, and the group specifically for EDs/CEOs, ED Happy Hour, has over 200 members. These are great forums for when you have a problem and want to get advice from colleagues. Check them out.

As I reflected on my own experience over a 25-year career in technology, I realized that there is more to it than an oppressive male dominated environment and an unconscious bias in corporate cultures that hold us back. 

Personal power is the energy behind all your actions. 

It’s the way of putting your ideas, visions and inspirations out in the world.  When you’ve internalized negative beliefs and disempower yourself, you are shutting down the flow of energy to do meaningful work, to take action on your own behalf, and to trust your decision making process because you begin to live in a state of constant self-doubt and frustration.