Tiny habits for big success
New year, new you
Does it seem like no matter how inspired or motivated you are to make big changes, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed or simply drift back into old habits? Stanford Professor BJ Fogg, PhD has done a lot of research on what he calls Tiny Habits – healthy behavior change you can easily integrate into your daily life. Add a new tiny habit, and the next thing you know, it ends up turning into big results.
Fogg’s research can help you make big changes in 2023, and I’ll share a few tips from his work that show you how. First though, I’d like to share an example from my own life on how I’ve applied Tiny Habits.
From swimming one lap to escaping from Alcatraz
Humberto Chacon at Aquatic Park in San Francisco getting ready for a training swim to escape from Alcatraz, which is pictured off in the distance behind him.
Let me tell you a story of how I turned swimming one lap a day into an escape from Alcatraz. It might help to know that my family is from the high desert mountains of northern Mexico, where hardly anyone swims, as there are no bodies of water to swim in. So swimming is not in my background.
However, one cold and windy day in San Francisco, I looked out over the roiling bay waters and imagined escaping from the Rock. Of course, everyone knows you can’t escape from Alcatraz; the current is too strong, it’s too windy, the waves are too big, it’s too cold, there’s too much fog, it’s too far, and there are sharks. In addition to all of these hazards, I could barely stay above water. All of these things kept me from seriously considering making the crossing. But then I read about someone who had made many Alcatraz crossings and who was going to teach a clinic.
I went to the clinic and was inspired to formulate a plan to escape from the island. Do you know what I used to make that plan? Tiny Habits. I started with just one lap in the pool the first time I went for a training swim. I did just one lap a day for a week. I wasn’t trying to get exercise. I was looking to start a new habit of swimming. Eventually, I built up the capacity to swim more than two miles. This was useful, since the distance from Alcatraz to San Francisco is about one and a half miles when you factor in zig-zagging on the course. Turns out there are no lane lines in the Bay!
After a few months, I entered and completed an Alcatraz race. The swim taught me that starting small can lead to meeting a big goal. Now I’m looking forward to doing my 18th Alcatraz swim.