Let’s talk about Rapid Habit Practice.
If you are like me, it can be so frustrating when you have a habit that you really want to develop, but you just don’t engage in the activity enough to develop that habit as quickly as you’d like.
Let me give you an example.
When I was in high school, I was on my school’s golf team. I really enjoyed the sport and appreciated the excuse to play a round of golf each week. But I discovered that I had a pretty bad habit where I would get angry every time I missed a putt. As soon as I realized this, I came to the conclusion that I had to re-train myself to relax whenever this happened. But there was a problem: I was barely on the golf course to practice this new habit.
How could I develop a habit quickly if I didn’t have the time to get my reps in?
Enter future pacing.
The concept is pretty simple: you think of a situation you want to change from your past in your mind. Identify how you would have wanted to respond, then practice in your mind. This way you can mentally get the reps in and better prepare your mind to react in the new way you’d like to.
Okay, back to my example.
If I wanted to change my immediate response from anger to relaxed, I had to identify a queue (in this case, putting), identify a trigger (getting angry), and then insert the new habit I wanted to develop (taking two deep breaths and saying “okay, next shot”).
Then I’d break my frame. This means I would change my mental state by thinking about something entirely different, maybe what I had for breakfast, or count backward from 61 by 8s, or something equally unrelated to my golf game. Then I’d run through the scenario in my mind again.
When I manufactured this scenario in my mind, I was able to practice this new response several times a day rather than once a week. Then, when I found myself putting on the golf course, I was much more likely to respond with the new habit I had trained myself to react with.
So, there you have it! Future pacing is a great tool for developing a habit quickly, and I hope you use it so that it can help you as much as it has helped me. You can catch a video of me running through this tool HERE!
