In 2012, Charles Duhigg, a New York Times reporter, published The Power of Habit with an engaging visual for its cover: a little human running on a wheel. The comparison successfully brings to mind hamster wheels and the rodents that find themselves occupied running up a loop that ever rotates. But to run on top of the wheel’s exterior? To handstand and fling away from it? These are not as easy to expect to see. And neither is what they represent in the book itself: someone who has broken free of a habit loop.

Has a habit ever felt inescapable to you? You wouldn’t be alone. Habits are powerful and widely studied. Understanding how they form allows us to identify bad habits and intentionally create good ones.

Let's return to 2012. The book The Power of Habit has been published and is taking the financial and business world by storm. It will stay a New York Times best seller for 60 weeks. Why are its contents so compelling? Because habits are compelling. They play a role in our life everyday. But they aren’t a force outside of our power. The book argues that, for as simple as they may appear, “habits- even once they are rooted in our minds- aren’t destiny. We can choose our habits, once we know how.” This time on CLCI Live, watch Jen Long (PCC), Anthony Lopez (MCPC), Joe McParland (MCLC), Jerome LeDuff (MCLC), and Lisa Finck (MCC) as they highlight the power of choosing good habits, as well as the ways to break out of those automatic loops keeping us in a bad one. 

What Is A Habit?

Aside from not being destiny, what are habits? The Power of Habit visualizes them as a “three-step loop”. This process occurs in our brains, mostly through what gets colloquially called the “reward pathway/circuit” and is more specifically thought to primarily occur in the mesolimbic dopamine system. The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai breaks it down like this:

The brain's reward circuit, including the amygdala (emotions) and hippocampus (memory/learning), plays a key role in how habits become ingrained.

The Power of Habit’s three step loop is broken down like this: 

• Cue: The trigger to go “into automatic mode” and for which habit to use

• Routine: The habit behavior itself. It can be physical, mental, or emotional

• Reward: This is the activation of the mesolimbic dopamine system which encourages someone to repeat what they just did to activate it

Like any circle, there’s no end point. Cue, routine, reward, loops back to cue, routine, reward. Eventually, the book explains, “The cue and reward become intertwined until a powerful sense of anticipation and craving emerges.”

So habits are all about repetition and are driven internally by the intertwining of cue and reward. Their often automatic nature can mean we just do our habits subconsciously, not intentionally. Here’s where the dark side to the habit system comes in.

Bad Habits...

Bad habits can be defined as repetitive behaviors that negatively impact daily life and those around us. Some common bad habits your clients may want coaching on can be excessive phone use, saying yes to someone’s request without getting full context, and procrastination on personal projects.

Consider a cue of some mild restlessness. Rather than exploring its cause, we might immediately reach for our phones. Just seeing the home screen might alleviate it- even though it’s done nothing, we remember its rewards and feel the relief before that reward has even happened yet in this instance. But how transformative was this action? What could we have done instead of automatic phone scrolling?

Sometimes, habits involve a physical routine. One might alleviate restlessness, boredom, or worry, and so can be considered self soothing. This is a complex area, though, and it’s good to distinguish that before lumping all self soothing habits into one cause. For some, these types of self soothing techniques might be a result of anxiety; under the umbrella of body-focused repetitive behavior (BFRB) disorders, nail biting and picking (onychophagia and onychotillomania), hair pulling (trichotillomania), skin picking (excoriation) and others can be found. Other times, these techniques could be related to “stimming” (which in and of itself is not problematic for an individual, but stimming that involves harm to the body is).

What is important to keep in mind that as a coach, you are neither diagnosing the problem, nor are you "fixing" the client. So what can you do?

…And How To Break Them

Breaking out of a habit is challenging. First, it requires self awareness. It’s also important to understand how habits work, and then identify what the ‘rewards’ to the habit you want to break are. Replacing the routine with a healthier alternative that gets the same reward is one option. Replacing the reward with a different reward until the first isn’t craved is another. Finally, there has to be a conscious effort to change.

So, as a coach, should you just explain these steps to your client? No. What you can do instead is shift the focus into partnering with your client to explore their habits, with them in the lead. Ask questions, evoke awareness, and be authentic. They have to be the one to become aware of their habit, its cause, and it has to be their conscious decision to change. 

It won’t always be easy. Reinforcement from friends and family can contribute to maintaining bad habits, making it easier to blame others for the client's behaviors. Cues can be social, and so can rewards. Consistently blaming external sources prevents clients from recognizing and changing self-sabotaging habits within their control.

"What is in your control?". This question, as a coach, is your jumping off point and the way clients can start to disrupt the cues and behavior aspects of the habit- the “routine”.

Another strategy for breaking a bad habit is establishing good habits as defined by the client. You may want to ask questions like "what new cues can you introduce?", "What new behaviours would you like to see?", "How will you reward yourself for following through?".

And finally, a critical part of any strategy chosen: "how will you give yourself grace during the process?"

In The Coaching Chair

As coaches, we don't tell our clients what habit they should break, or what way they should break it. A coach also doesn’t need to explain the neurophysiological processes that drive habits. So why should a coach bother to know any of this at all?

In the coaching world, the knowledge of how habits form in our mind and continue to automatically operate is useful. Coaches don’t tell clients what to do. But a coach that understands this habit loop and how to break or alter it has a better baseline to inform their line of questioning and create a supportive space. Let's go over some of those options a coach can take.

Questions are a coach’s best friend in many ways. By asking powerful questions, clients will self reflect or reconsider how they’ve been thinking. In this context, good questions could lead the client to examining if they have a habit they want to work on, what its emotional or physical cue is, what its reward(s) is/are, and more. This can lead to discoveries and plans that run deep. And ‘all’ the coach did was ask a question!

Similarly, coaches might see what looks like a bad habit from their client. But rather than telling them they do, coaches can help the client notice patterns. For anyone trying to break a bad habit, self awareness is one of the original key necessities. It’s no different when it’s a client and not you.

What about breaking bad habits? Suggesting good habits? This isn’t an area where the coach should be teaching or diagnosing anymore than before. The outcome is client-led. You may share your observations of patterns in a neutral manner, it is up to the client to decide what to do with them.

In this space, coaches can co-create a space where the client can experiment with small changes, celebrate progress, and build sustainable habits that feel authentic to them

Clients that choose to work with a coach aren’t choosing to read and act upon The Power of Habit, or the mountain of other self-help books out there. Say it with us. You are not their living self-help book. But with your support, they can discover, determine, and enact what they need to help themselves with solutions from themselves.

Thank you,

Jen Long (PCC), Anthony Lopez (MCPC), Joe McParland (MCLC), Jerome LeDuff (MCLC), and Lisa Finck (MCC)

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