If I just did one thing to create a new habit, I would change the design of my environment. For me, this is the most powerful thing you can do to successfully build a habit. It is deceptively simple and yet I find it is often the part that people resist the most.

notice your surroundings.

Environment is simply your surroundings. Whether at home, at work, in the car, wherever you are, your surroundings are your environment. And your environment shapes your habits, whether you’ve designed it to or not.

Take a moment to consider a habit you want to create or have been struggling to build. Now, look at your surroundings and consider whether they are helping or hindering you. You want to eat an apple a day. Where are the apples? Can you see them and are they easy to access? You want to do more exercise, where do you keep your kit? You want to work on your business after work. Where is your laptop?

Don’t consider these things in isolation. If your apples are located next to chocolate, which are you more likely to reach for? If your laptop is in a different room and the TV remote is lying in view when you finish your dinner, which is more likely to happen?

the best of intentions.

You can have the best of intentions, but your environment has been designed around your existing habits. Or your existing habits have been built to fit your existing environment. Either way, the easy option is what you already do.

So, no matter how good your intentions, you could be sabotaging yourself before you get the chance to start. If you eat your dinner sitting on the sofa with the TV on, you are making it harder to stop watching and do something else instead. If you need to come back into your house after work before you go to the gym, you are surrounding yourself with cues for other activities and so they become easier than going back out to go to the gym.

two workspaces.

I’m lucky. I have a couple of spaces in our house where I can work. When I worked full time, I had a space where I worked from home and a separate space where I worked on my coaching side hustle. This meant I could deliberately finish one type of work and signal to my brain that I was finished. I would take a break and then start in the other location to focus on different work.

Because it was the end of my workday, I would have my dinner. This gave me a break before I started working again, and I was also able to create a habit stack: after I wash my dishes, I go upstairs to my office.

You don’t need two offices to make this work. If you are working on a side hustle, you could take your laptop to the kitchen table. Once you finish your dinner, you sit on a different seat and do some work before you do anything else with your evening.

why copying doesn’t work.

This is another reason why copying someone else’s routine rarely, if ever, works. They have a different environment to you. Different cues. Different obstacles. Different lifestyle.

I eat my dinner at the kitchen table, so I go nowhere near the sofa or the TV. They are in a different room. I reach the stairs before the lounge door, so it’s easier for me to go upstairs. But, to help me, I also keep the lounge door shut, so I can’t see the sofa or the TV or my knitting. Nothing prompts me to take a break and sit and relax.

it’s not the habit.

Whatever the habit, whatever the obstacle, the answer is always to change one thing at a time. Trying to overhaul your environment or make drastic changes is doomed. Make one change to your environment. It could be to tidy a space, it could be to rearrange it, or close the door to a room that tempts you in.

It’s unlikely you have tried to create the wrong habit. Identifying the habit is usually straightforward. The challenge comes when it’s not working. Start with your environment and consider what is getting in your way. Then change one thing.

If I did just one thing to create a new habit, I would change my environment, one thing at a time.

If you aren’t sure how to change your environment, book a free introductory call and we’ll work it out together.