Think how stubborn some of your negative habits are. They’re probably pretty ingrained with a lot of unconscious choices that have already been made. They’re probably a part of your routine and the way you respond to your environment.

For a healthy habit to be sustainable, it’s about the process(es) we put behind the purpose. It’s the ongoing, consistent, persistent insistence that we are committed to micro moves over time that finally “melts the ice cube.” Your first shift in thinking can come from making a habit of thinking about your habits — both the good and bad (or healthy and unhealthy if we’re using nonjudgmental language).

In Atomic Habits, James Clear says several times that he was an average writer and student for as long as he went to school, basically until he started writing blog posts on the subject of habits. Then, he made some commitments to himself about what he would do, and also when, and for how long he would spend on each one.

This leads to our first step:

Step 1: Be specific and ground it in reality

Name the habit you’re going to start. Make it a date: Name the time and place. If you really want to boil down the beginning of a habit process, this is the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end.

In the end, we need a good structure. It doesn’t matter where you went to college, or how high your cheekbones are, if you don’t have good structure, your processes — built on habits — are going to break down. If you’re one of those people that needs structure but doesn’t have it, maybe consider making a habit out of making a daily structure.

I can attest to needing help in this area myself. I used to hate the idea of even managing a calendar even while I was a full-time professor and father of three. I liked my little To-Do list in front of my face and that was enough for me. But over the years, I’ve come to find my calendar a beacon: a light out of the tunnel of stress. And through fits and starts, I have found things like the Full-Focus Planner to be a great help.

Step 2: Make it easy to say yes (and easy to say no)

Put it on the calendar if it applies to your habit. Write it down in visual proximity. Take every realistic step to make it as easy as possible to say yes to your habit when the time arrives.

You don’t want open loops cluttering your head, reminding you multiple times that you need to remember x. That will wear you out fast. You want automation. Your body is supremely good at automation once it gets started.

By contrast, if you’re trying to stop a habit, think about the triggers that initiate the automatic response. Make it hard to say yes.

Often, when it comes to beginning a new habit, we first have to break an old one. The problem is that even as we begin a new healthy habit, the old one we’re trying to break gets in the way because it is firmly established as a triggering mechanism, or as researchers also say, a “cue.” If you don’t want to play video games at night, it’s going to be hard to stop if the video games are still plugged in, and the TV or computer still there in the same spot.

If you are trying to break a bad habit, but you take no proactive steps to remove the cues, then your intention will fail. A 2005 study by Wood, W., Tam, L., & Witt, M. G. called “Changing circumstances, disrupting habits” in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology tracked the behavior of college students who transferred from one school to another. They found that the students’ behavior change was almost completely dictated by their surroundings. If the cues remained in place, so did the habit, and if the cues were not present or as readily available the behavior conformed to the surrounding conditions.

In this case, the idea that “wherever you go there you are,” or that the grass only seems greener on the other side, may not necessarily apply. At the fraternity house I lived in at Barton College, there was a party nearly every night. It was next to impossible to get away from the abusive drinking and drugs. It was prevalent amongst the people I lived with. The only way to get away was to remove myself altogether.

A few months later, having transferred to Baylor University, living off-campus with three roommates who didn’t drink, and surrounded by everyone else I met who didn’t drink, neither did I. During that first year at Baylor I drank a few beers on two or three occasions. Part of it was what I desired, but by far the main factor was that there were no cues and no social pressure. If there was any social pressure, it was to conform to a conservative culture.

My experience is an example of what the study demonstrates. You don’t have to move away or create a major life transition to make a behavior change. You do have to combine both your intention to change with taking away the previous cues that create the conditions for the undesired behavior.

Your beliefs, intentions, and knowledge of specific strategies are great, especially for taking action and trying to create a new habit. They are like a brief downpour on a hot highway unless you’ve found a way to disrupt existing unproductive habits and create contexts to support the healthy behaviors long term.

Step 3: Make yourself accountable to others

Goals are effectively “dreams” because they’re still a fantasy unless the goal is developed over time through the underlying systems you put in place. One of the processes you put in place is to tell other people about your habit so that you’re held accountable and you’re “making it real.”

Whether it’s one person, your family, or an announcement you make to the “world” on social media, verbalizing your habit to others makes your habit real on another level. We’re social animals. We need the encouragement, the curiosity, the approval of others. For many, this step helps enormously.

Another aspect of making your habit real to others is that it requires a little courage. As contemporary novelist Nicole Krauss wrote to Vincent Van Gogh in response to a letter he had written to his brother:

Dear Vincent,

You write about fear: Fear of the blank canvas, but also, on a larger scale, of the “infinitely meaningless, discouraging blank side” that life itself always turns toward us, and which can only be countered when a person “steps in and does something,” when he “breaks” or “violates.”

It’s extraordinary that I should have been given your letter now, because it is exactly that act of breaking that has been on my mind this last year, and which I feel has everything to do with how I want to make art, and how I want to live…

…Bravery is always more intelligent than fear, since it is built on the foundation of what one knows about oneself: the knowledge of one’s strength and capacity, of one’s passion.”

In most cases, it is fear that keeps us mired in what is familiar to us now, in resigning ourselves that we won’t be able to make sustained changes. It takes real courage to commit to the micro-actions that lead you to form habits you want to carry with you day in and day out — not to mention disrupting the unhealthy ones.

Step 4: Track your progress

This works better for some activities (and personality types) than others, but organized habit tracking is a great way to complete the loop of developing and maintaining personal accountability to your habit. Spreadsheets are not for everyone, but that’s not the only way — or the only motive — for habit tracking.

Tracking is your ultimate weapon at looking at the micro-actions that result in the macro changes. Tracking is your way of personal accountability. I do a lot of journaling and it helps me when I go back to see how I’ve already lived out certain patterns or behaviors or experiences that I would have forgotten or overlooked. Tracking works the same way.

Habit change depends on disrupting cues associated with less-desirable habits, structuring your environment to make it easy to repeat productive behaviors in stable contexts, and linking behaviors to intrinsic rewards. You can’t always know the reward, or possibly even be aware of it, but they will be there as you develop your pattern. It could be you simply have a feeling of accomplishment. In other cases, especially if you are in a community around your habit, maybe your friend praises you for going to the gym so consistently. It could be that your social life actually expands and you come into more contact with the type of people you want to associate with that reinforces your habit pattern.

Tracking helps on the back end of the habit continuum. It reinforces your micromovements and measures them at the same time.

Perfectionism is the enemy

Go ahead and embrace the reality that you are going to struggle at some point. That is exactly the point where many fall short in establishing a new habit. Some call this the “What the hell effect.” Once people have messed up a little bit, they tend to say, “What the hell, I’ve screwed up, so I guess I wasn’t cut out for this new habit after all.” If you’ve ever talked yourself into drinking one night during the week when you said you wouldn’t — only to have it turn into a drink for the rest of the week — you’ve experienced this effect in action.

I must have instinctively known this when I was 17 and wanted to quit smoking. I was up to about a half a pack a day and had been addicted for a year-and-a-half. Before that, I had been a cross-country and track athlete. I wasn’t happy with myself. I wanted to stop.

Finally, one day I made a decision that I would stop. I recognized I would have weak moments when other friends were smoking around me, or simply when I got obsessed with a craving. I knew in advance that I would fail, and I didn’t want to let those micro-failures have the final say.

After a few days of not smoking, I told some of my friends in the cafeteria (smokers and non-smokers) about my plan to stop “cold turkey” but allowing myself the grace to fail and keep going. They all told me it wasn’t a realistic plan.

In the end, my plan did work. I did fail at times, but each time I was mindful of how it felt to smoke the cigarette even against my overall efforts. Each time I would tell myself it wasn’t worth it, and that I was starting over again. Gradually, the distance between each smoke grew, and my physical and mental addiction waned. A few months later, I was smoke-free. My smoker friends went on smoking.

When forming new habits, it’s important not to let a single stumble ruin your day or week. You’re not going to be perfect. It can come as a relief to recognize this. Willpower will not always win the day. You are fallible, and recognizing this up front can take a lot of unnecessary pressure off.

Focus instead on how far you’ve come and how many days in a row you’ve accomplished your new habit. Just realize it’s a process, forgive yourself, and continue on toward your goals. Regroup and think about any of the four steps that you may be missing.

Have grace for yourself from the beginning. If you don’t have grace for yourself, you won’t get started. But be strong with yourself too. Let yourself know that you believe in yourself, and not everything worth doing comes easy.

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