How Emotionally Intelligent People Use the ‘Two-Day Rule’ to Make New (and Old) Habits Stick - Inc.
EXPERT OPINION BY JEFF HADEN @JEFF_HADEN
For years, I didn’t wear a seat belt. No reason why not, just didn’t. Then one day our daughters came home and told me their teachers said they if they wanted to keep their parents safe, they should always remind them to wear their seat belts.
So I started wearing a seat belt. It’s kinda hard to tell your kids what’s good for them if you aren’t willing to take their advice.
Decades later, it feels weird–actually uncomfortable, and I’m hardly “Mr. Safety” –to not be buckled up. That’s the thing about habits: Do something often enough, and you stop thinking about it. You just do it.
Another thing about habits? You have a lot more of them than you might think. A study published in Current Directions in Psychological Science found that more than 40 percent of the “decisions” we make every day aren’t really choices: They’re habits.
Much of the time, we just do what we always do, even if those actions, those habits, aren’t as effective, productive, or healthy as they could be… if we were actually making a choice.
Yes, creating better habits is key to success, in whatever way you choose to define “success.”
Start with Process…
One way to build new habits is to build routines, because routines can be critical to success. Say you’re trying to boost sales, and want to make five cold calls every day. Great: Decide that you’ll make those calls at 10 a.m., block out and protect that time, create a calendar alert, hold yourself accountable by embracing Jerry Seinfeld’s “put an X on the calendar technique,” and get started.
Within a week or two, you won’t have to decide to make five cold calls. You won’t to make yourself make five cold calls.
You’ll just make them, because that’s what you do.
Breaking a goal down into daily activities and then consistently performing those activities, day in and day out? That’s how successful people accomplish huge goals.
But what happens when you fall off the routine wagon?
… and When the Process ‘Fails’…
Eventually, though, something will disrupt your carefully crafted routine. You have to drop everything to make a customer ship date. You have to deal with an interpersonal problem between two employees. If you’re trying to eat healthy, you get invited out for dinner and boom: There goes the chicken, rice and broccoli you planned to fix at home for dinner.
Then it’s really hard to get back on the process and habit wagon. Habits are really hard to form, and really easy to break. One day becomes two. Then three.
That’s when your emotions start to work against you, not for you. Re-starting seems really hard. It’s much easier to plan to restart than to just restart. You start thinking, “I’ll get going again tomorrow.” And suddenly a week or two has passed, and your routine–your habit–has disappeared.
Not only are you not doing whatever you wanted to do, but you also feel bad about yourself for not doing it, which makes it much harder to find the motivation to re-establish that habit or routine.
Embrace the Two-Day Rule
That’s where YouTuber Matt D’Avella’s Two-Day rule comes in.
The premise is simple: never let two days pass without acting towards your goal. If your goal is to make five cold calls a day, and you don’t make them today, that’s OK. Just make sure you make five cold calls tomorrow. If your goal is to spend 15 minutes talking to at least one employee every day–about their goals, their ideas, about bottlenecks or logjams you can help clear so they can more easily do their jobs–and you don’t do that today, that’s OK. Just sure you do that tomorrow.
If you eat out tonight and fall off your diet wagon, that’s OK. Just make sure you get back on it tomorrow.
That’s also true if your routine is so restrictive that success actually feels like failure. If you planned to make your cold calls at 10 a.m. and couldn’t get to them until 2 p.m., that’s OK. You still made your cold calls and can still check it off your daily routine list.
Habits are great, but overly strict routines can be habit killers.
Science backs that up. In a study about exercise published in Management Science, a research team assigned employees to one of three groups. One group was asked to designate a convenient two-hour window and were told to follow a strict routine: something along the lines of “work out at 6 p.m. every day.” A second group followed a flexible plan, working out whenever they wished. Participants in both of those groups were paid every time they completed a workout.
The third group, the control group, was simply “encouraged” to work out more; no routine, no plan, and no pay.
Unsurprisingly, being paid to exercise worked a treat. Both the routine and the flexible group worked out more often than the control group.
More surprisingly, after four weeks — when the exercise habit was theoretically established, and the researchers stopped paying participants — the flexible group (the people who followed a plan) were more than twice as likely to keep working out than the strict group (the people who had established a rigid routine).
Why? Routines are great until something disrupts that routine, and the more rigid your routine, the more likely your routine will be disrupted. Give yourself a little flexibility, and you can adapt to what the day brings. You can adapt to how you put your habit into practice; if you only have time to make three cold calls, you didn’t reach your target, but you haven’t failed. You still did something.
Which means you’re much more likely to make five cold calls tomorrow, because you’ll still feel (at least mostly) good about yourself. Again, your emotions will work for you, not against you, one of the cornerstones of emotional intelligence.
The same is true if you miss a day. Resume your habit the next day, and the habit is much more likely to stick. Missed yesterday? Emotionally, no big deal–especially if you get going again today.
Try it. Pick a habit you want to form. Create a consistent routine that will help you put that habit into place. Accept the fact you may not always be perfect, and give yourself the grace of embracing the two-day rule.
You’ll be much more likely to stay the long-term behavioral course, and feel good about yourself along the way.
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