Pat yourself on the back--week three is complete!

Woohoo! Believe it or not, you're already just one stage away from earning your 28-day completion badge. How did you like what you learned this week?  Do you feel like all of these topics will give you the tools to be your own best coach?

To complete this week, the final topic is about building healthy habits in all areas of life.  Everything you have learned this week gives you the tools to build healthy habits, but this will directly connect to the concept of a habit.

You already possess a lot of habits: brushing your teeth in the morning, checking your email when you get to work, making your bed, looking both ways before you cross the street. Each is an acquired behavior pattern that you're so accustomed to, you do it without thinking. With the right mindset and a little practice, healthy living can become a habit, too.

The commonly held belief is that it takes 21 days to build a new habit. This has never felt right to me, so I decided to dig into this topic. It turns out this is not correct according to the latest research.

The 21-days theory was originally developed by a plastic surgeon in the 1950s who observed that it took his patients 21 days to get used to their new face. He then wrote a best-selling book about this and soon, everyone believed the theory.

Phillippa Lally, a health psychology researcher at University College London, led the more recent research. Her team did a controlled experiment on the time it takes for different types of activities to become a habit. They found that the average time to build a habit was 66 days. Even that number isn’t too meaningful, though, because, depending on the type of activity, the range of "days until habit" was anywhere between 18 and 254 days.

So how long does it take to build a habit. The easy answer is: It depends.

Building a Mountain of Habits

I imagine the time to build a habit depends both on the type of activity and also on the person. For example, I’d guess that people who practice building habits in all areas of life are then able to build their next habits faster and better. Similarly, people who are really good at putting in the work to build a habit also likely do it faster and better.

You might need to maintain very strong focus and discipline to build a habit, but once it’s established, you don’t need to think about it as much as it becomes more automatic. Therein lies the true benefit of a habit.

I like to visualize this as building a mountain of habits. Each time you build one habit, that habit then becomes part of who you are and how you live your life. Your habits can propel you to success or keep you from achieving greatness.