Changing stubborn habits

If you want to elevate your behavior, stop hanging out with turkeys. (Oregon State University Special Collections)

Ali, an eight-year-old piano student, was having trouble keeping her wrists level. She kept resting them on the piano case while she was playing, thus creating tension and restricting motion. Every few seconds, I had to either verbally correct her or gently nudge her wrists up.

Because I secretly desire to be a mean piano teacher rapping knuckles with a wooden ruler, I did this:

The tape is sticky-side up, fastened with a piece of folded-up tape on either side.

This turned out to be an immediate, complete solution to Ali's problem. She never touched the tape, and I never had to remind her not to. She simply decided that she didn't want to get stuck to the tape, and reminded herself to keep her wrists up.

To me, this is proof that to break a habit, we already have what we need. Once we are aware of the problem we seek to solve and committed to solving it, we can simply take different actions to achieve our desired result.

In order to change our actions, however, we will need a way of monitoring ourselves. If I’m trying to sit up straight, my slouching will return whenever I’m not consciously focused on my posture until the habit is established. In Ali’s case, the sticky-side-up tape was a cue to support the internal monitoring.

We can make use of these types of cues in many contexts to transform our behavior. In my own attempt to change habits or to “reset” for the day in order to restore focus, my most frequent tactic is to use a timer. There’s something about having the timer on in the background that prevents me from distractions. If the timer’s running, to stray from the task at hand would be “cheating.” At the very least, every time the timer goes off, it’s an opportunity to check in with myself and see if I’m on track.

When I’ve inherited piano students from other teachers, they have a common problem: They glance down at their hands frequently as they play. They don’t trust that their fingers are in the right place; they have learned to rely on visual cues instead of tactile and auditory ones. They have to learn to visualize their hands — that is, to see their hands in their mind’s eye rather than with their eyes.

To fix this problem, I ask them to play a very short section of the piece they’re working on and instruct them to look down “only five times.”

The improvement is immediate. Usually, they’ll only look once or twice. They are monitoring themselves, which makes a difference. However, even more importantly, they know I am watching, too! That makes them literally self-conscious, monitoring themselves through my eyes. The impact is powerful. Within minutes, they can play without looking down at all.

To maintain this habit, they’ll need to keep up the monitoring. This is hard to do without support. A good solution would be a video camera trained on the student while they are practicing. Sure, they can then review the video and see how they did. But more importantly, the pianist’s awareness that the video camera is there to catch each look will prevent the behavior in the first place.

Whatever we are trying to change about ourselves or our habits, we can use external supports to assist with our internal monitoring. Food logs, time logs, and budget spreadsheets are all ways of doing this. Timers, trackers, and dedicated apps can come into play; video recording and even mirrors will help; coaches, consultants, therapists, trainers, and instructors can offer support; and communities for encouragement and accountability, both online and in real life, can keep us going. All of these tools and resources, when used with a sense of intention, can facilitate the basic, essential choice to change our actions to yield a different outcome.

Every time I complete a paragraph of writing, I’m drinking a sip of water. But that’s not all: I’m logging my water consumption in an app. I could also keep tally marks on a notepad next to me each time I take a sip, seeing if I can match my score from the previous day. Hopefully, I can use these external monitoring tactics to prevent the dehydration headaches that come from spending hours in dry, heated indoor air — a cue I’m not interested in encountering.

Yes, it’s nerdy and perhaps unwieldy to engage these layers of effort over something relatively trivial — but these same tactics can also be deployed at a very high level to solve our biggest challenges. Try it and see.

What habits would you like to change (or develop)? How do you use self-monitoring already? How might you add external forms of monitoring to achieve your desired result?