Power is perhaps the most important principle when it comes to habit change. In order to change your habits, you must focus on your desired outcome and exert a serious effort. The more disciplined you become, the easier it is to change your habits.
Remember that you’re responsible for how your life turns out. Whether your habits make you or break you, you’re the one who must deal with the long-term consequences. Since habits wield power over your results, you must wield power over your habits.
In the game of chess, it’s generally a bad idea to try to attack your opponent’s king right out of the gate unless your opponent is a complete beginner. If you want to win, you must be smarter than that. Chess has an early game, a middle game, and an endgame. In the early game, you want to get off to a strong start and try to gain a slight advantage. In the middle game, you employ tactics to capture your opponent’s pieces and put yourself in a superior position. It’s only in the endgame that you go after the king directly, and even then you may need to continue weakening your opponent for a while before you’re ready to declare checkmate.
Changing habits is a lot like playing chess. If you go for a direct frontal assault right out of the gate, your attacks will be easily deflected, and your efforts will only make you look silly. Don’t try to tackle an entrenched habit head-on by powering through it. Focus your early game efforts on making indirect moves. Aim to put yourself in a superior position by attacking the habit’s supporting structure. Change the circumstances to stop reinforcing your old patterns, and assemble the proper scaffolding to support your new desired behaviors.
In the early game, you’re merely setting up your pieces, but you aren’t trying to change the habit yet. Buy some books about the change you want to make, ask for advice from others who’ve already made similar changes, and see if you can find someone to mentor you. Join a support group if possible. Do whatever you can to create the right conditions for future success.
In the middle game, you’ll employ specific tactics to give yourself an advantage. If you’ve played the early game properly, you should already know what those tactics are. You may come up with your own tactics, of course, but you’ll probably learn most of them from other people. For example, if you want to change your eating habits and lose weight, specific methods may include measuring food portions, keeping a food journal, buying extra fruits and vegetables, ridding your house of junk food, learning healthy recipes, keeping the television turned off at mealtimes, finding a diet buddy, joining a weight-loss group, buying a new scale, posting pictures of thin people to motivate you, avoiding situations where you tend to overeat, charting your progress, and so on. You’ll implement many of these tactics in advance—before you even begin your new diet—so that when you’re ready to start, you’re already in a superior position.
Once you reach the endgame, it’s time to go after your target directly. If you’ve done the preparation work of the early and middle games, you’ll be ready for the final thrust. This is where you put your power to the test. Can you make the desired change stick? Can you break the old pattern and implement the new one?
* Source: Personal Development for Smart People by Steve Pavlina