My last two weeks’ columns have outlined how to break the cycle of high hopes around New Year’s resolutions followed by disappointment and dashed expectations. In an article two weeks ago, I outlined research that the key to any important change, whether in personal life or in business, lies not in greater discipline but in creating habits that put the right behavior on automatic pilot. And last week’s article outlined six initial steps to make resolutions stick:
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Focus on one or two new habits
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Be ambitious – but with a reality check
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Expect success- but anticipate setbacks
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Be specific about what you want to achieve
Change the activity that triggers habits
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Move at the right pace
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Here are four additional steps to create new habits in your routine.
Use defaults to automate your routine
The past two decades has seen growing attention to the field of behavioral economics, focusing on how emotions create biases in decision-making. Among leaders in this field are the University of Chicago’s Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, whose work on “nudging” people towards the right decisions I covered in articles on how to your middle class clients retire and a simple strategy to triple client savings.
Among the key concepts in behavioral research is creating the right “defaults” – the things that happen unless people intervene to make a change. Duke’s Dan Ariely has studied how consent for organ donations can go from under 15% in Germany to almost 100% in next-door Austria. The difference was the default decision – in Germany the default outcome was not to donate organs unless drivers made a change; in Austria the default is that organs are donated unless drivers opt out.
Advisors looking to change habits can use two approaches to create defaults in their routine – time blocking and predetermined client meeting agendas. Let’s suppose that the new habit you’re aiming to create is to start each day with a 15-minute meeting with your team, have lunch each Friday with the accountant for a key client or spend 90 minutes on Wednesday morning touching base with prospects. You can use a recurring appointment in your calendar to time block that morning staff meeting, the time on Wednesday to contact prospects and the Friday lunch with a client accountant; you can also block time on Friday morning to call client accountants to set up lunches down the road.
Suppose instead that the new habit you’re targeting relates to talking to clients about introductions to their accountants, offering to pull together a comprehensive overview of all their holdings (including investments held with other advisors or in self-directed accounts) or getting family members involved in discussions of client finances. One way to do that is to develop a template for a client meeting agenda that includes whichever of these topics you want to focus on. That template will be the starting point for the agenda you’ll propose to clients for your meetings; including it on the template dramatically increases the odds that this item will appear on the final agenda for the meeting.
Track activity to begin and end the day
When creating new habits around client communication or prospecting, you’ll seldom see immediate outcomes. That’s why you need to focus on the right behavior, knowing that if you put the activity in place results will follow. One way to make that activity happen is to spend two minutes when you get to the office focusing on what you’ll do in the day ahead and another two before you leave reflecting back on what you did. I described this in a recent article on the best way to end your day, highlighting research from the Harvard Business School on the impact of writing down what people have achieved at the end of each day.
In this research, employees of the India-based outsourcing firm, Wipro, were divided into two groups. The first maintained their normal routine and worked until the end of their shift. The second was asked to take 15 minutes before leaving to write down what had gone well that day. They did this for a 10-day period. For those 10 days, their productivity was 20% higher than the first group. The researchers concluded that taking time to reflect on positive outcomes built confidence and momentum. This finding is consistent with other research that feeling a sense of progress is a key to staying motivated. One interesting side note: Writing your accomplishments down by hand is more effective than entering them on your computer. Even in today’s high-tech age, old-school methods still work best to engage the brain.
Establish accountability
The weight-loss industry is arguably the best illustration of the difficulty of changing entrenched habits; each year Americans spend an estimated $15 billion on diet supplements and weight programs, with another $50 billion spent on reduced calorie products such as diet soda. Despite these expenditures, the weight-loss industry has an atrocious track record; a recent article in Time Magazine pointed to the discouraging results from every available third party research study on the popular weight loss programs. That said, in a field riddled with failure, studies do point to Weight Watchers as one program that offers modest hope for sustained weight loss, with the key being its group accountability that comes from its weekly weigh-ins.
My experience with advisors looking to implement significant change in their business points to peer-group accountability as one of the best ways to tilt the odds of success in your favor. Accountability for activity during the key initial 90 days when you’re trying to change habits was one of the practices that I highlighted in an article on how to break out of a rut. This accountability can take place as part of your weekly team meetings, with colleagues in your office or with a trusted friend. One group of four advisors has made substantial strides by meeting at 10 a.m. each Monday for a 30-minute coffee – during which time they cover three things: their progress in accomplishing their top three goals for the past week, what they learned in the past week and their goals for the coming week.
Take Jerry Seinfeld’s advice on tracking progress
The final step to changing how you work relates to tracking progress. Every Monday morning sit down, whether alone or with your team, to look back at your activity over the past week. Focus in particular on things that went right, taking the time to acknowledge and celebrate successes, no matter how small.
Here’s an excerpt from a popular site for writers on how Jerry Seinfeld tracks the right activity to stay successful.
Years ago, when software developer Brad Isaac was performing stand-up at open mic nights, he received his best advice ever from the already-famous comedian.
Seinfeld explained his method for success: each January, he hangs a large year-at-a-glance calendar on his wall and, for every day he wrote new material, he had the exquisite pleasure that can only come from drawing a big red "X" over that day. Drawing those Xs got to be pretty fun and rewarding, so he kept doing it. Eventually, he began to create a chain of red Xs. The idea was to never break that chain.
For more on how to make resolutions happen, this New York Times article provides tips on how to reinforce willpower and this free webinar outlines five steps to creating new habits that can put your practice on auto pilot.
Dan Richards conducts programs to help advisors gain and retain clients and is an award winning faculty member in the MBA program at the University of Toronto. To see more of his written commentaries, go to www.danrichards.com or here for his videos.
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