How to Make a Habit Stick: Rehearse and Revise

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Tiny Habits" by BJ Fogg. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.

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Want to know how to make a habit stick after you’ve developed it? Why is daily rehearsal so important? What are the five main skills needed to build on your habits?

In order to make a habit stick, rehearsal in our daily lives is crucial. Rehearsing habits helps you acquire the habit quickly and helps you remember to perform the habit.

Keep reading to learn more about how rehearsing and building upon Tiny Habits.

How to Make a Habit Stick

Any world-class athlete or musician can tell you about the importance of rehearsal, but our use of rehearsal in our daily lives is woefully inadequate. Tiny Habits author BJ Fogg believes that this technique, in particular, will be much more widely appreciated in the future. Here’s how to make a habit stick.

Rehearsing helps you to do two things: acquire the habit quickly and remember to do the habit if you’re having trouble.

Here’s how to rehearse. Think of your habit recipe. For now, let’s say it’s After I turn off the water in the sink, I will wipe the counter.

Go to the kitchen and take out some plates. Rinse them off, turn off the water, and wipe the counter. Celebrate lavishly.
Take the plates out again. Rinse them off, turn off the water… and so on.
Repeat this sequence at least seven times.
See what happens the next time you rinse off plates. Having encoded the behavior sequence through rehearsal and celebration, your brain will most likely nudge you to wipe the counter.

Broad Behavior Design Skill Sets

Zooming out, we can see that to become proficient at Behavior Design and make a habit stick, we need a full toolbelt of behavior change techniques. We can divide these techniques into five main skill sets. Remember that behavior change itself is a skill, so you can practice anything within these skill sets just like you practice your Tiny Habits.

Here are the five broad skill sets we draw on in Behavior Design:

1. Strategy
2. Clarity
3. Process
4. Environment
5. Attitude

1. Strategy

Strategy is knowing how to approach the behavior change process in a way that’ll work for you (or a person you’re helping). It includes selecting habits intelligently, refining them thoughtfully, and walking the line between too few and too many new habits at the same time.

The Strategy skill set includes the skills of:

Generating options (Swarm of Bs)
Identifying Golden Behaviors
Manipulating the Ability dimension

Plus a new skill: Maintaining a bird’s-eye view of your habit landscape.

Pull back and scan your garden. Are any parts overgrown (too densely planted or in need of a good weeding)? Is there any space where you could plant some new habits?

To build Strategy skills:

Follow your natural tendencies. Would you prefer to sprinkle lots of little habits throughout your day, or focus more intensively on one area? If you’re not sure, a typical Habiteer begins with three Tiny Habits and adds three new ones every month.
Sample the possibilities. Select a few different domains of your life (work, health, relationships) and implement one new habit in each. Mix up Starter Steps and Scaled-Back habits.
Adjust whenever needed. If a habit is no longer serving you, get rid of it. There’s no reason to continue the crochet habit you started three months ago if you’d rather be working on your jump shot.

2. Clarity

The second step in making a habit stick is to have clarity. Clarity is insight into your own motivations and needs. It’s understanding what kinds of change have the most value to you.

The Clarity skill set includes the skills of:

Pinpointing your aspirations and outcomes
Understanding your own motivation (“want to” vs. “should”)

Plus a new skill: Staying connected to your personal priorities.

To build Clarity skills:

Connect the new habit to a valued identity. If you want to be a person who feels and expresses gratitude, build the habit of thanking your partner when they take out the trash. If you want to be a person who cares about the environment, build the habit of carrying your own bottle of drinking water rather than using a new plastic bottle every day.
Choose habits that have an obvious link to your aspiration. The clearer the path from habit to aspiration, the easier it will be to remember and maintain the habit. Conversely, if there’s a habit that feels more like “I should” than “I want to,” it can help to dig down and identify the aspiration. When you dig down, you may find that actually the habit holds little personal meaning for you—perhaps it was your mother’s idea or based on what a friend did. In that case, ditch the habit and find something more meaningful.
Focus on habits with the most potential to spark other changes. Remember Sarika and her stovetop burner Starter Step? This habit was located in the kitchen, very fertile ground for new habits. Over time, this single Tiny Habit turned into her cooking for herself regularly and keeping the formerly disastrous kitchen tidy.

3. Process

Process skills come from a deep familiarity with the mechanics of habit change.

The Process skill set includes the skills of:

Rehearsing and refining
Changing your approach flexibly as needed

Plus a new skill: Managing sustainable growth. This includes:

Identifying the area of challenge.
Finding the point between the baseline Tiny Habit and “too hard.”
Being sensitive to day-to-day fluctuations in Ability and Motivation.
Knowing when not to push yourself. (If you’re sick, stressed, or very time-poor, it’s not the time to grow your habit.)

To build Process skills:

Guard against the “all in” tendency and quick self-criticism. We talked about the tendency to go “all in” on new habits back when we were talking about the pitfalls of relying on motivation. Remember that slow and steady wins the race.
Practice taking the pressure off. Don’t do more than you want to do at any time. Don’t listen to “shoulds.” Always feel completely comfortable reverting to the tiny version.
Closely monitor your emotional state. If you feel bored, challenge yourself. If you feel excited to do more, go with it. If you feel frustrated or annoyed, or if you start skipping days or procrastinating, scale back.
Calibrate your celebration to your effort. If you overdo it at any point (say if you get inspired and add 20 pushups all at once), scale up the celebration. You want your brain to keep associating the action with positive feelings. If you go too far and negative emotions arise, counterbalance them with a souped-up celebration. You could even pull out your Power Celebration.

How to Make a Habit Stick: Rehearse and Revise