Tending To Good Habits

Building good habits, whether for yourself or an organization, isn’t like the physical world of making something. In the physical world you pour the foundation and assuming you have done it right, you can now focus on the walls that stand upon it. The foundation if solid is immutable. Building good thoughts, good practices and good habits, for you and your organization, doesn’t have that benefit. They fade and wither if not constantly tended.

When creating a good habit that you want to keep you have to leave something of you behind to tend to it. If you move to the next habit and don’t look back what you have worked so hard to build will disappear. You move from one good thing to the next, oscillating in place, running in a circle, and not moving forward. You have fleeting moments of feeling great about what you are accomplishing but you have this uncomfortable, probably unconscious, realization that you are spinning in place.

The effort has to be on how to maintain a practice. If I do this next great habit, how do I give it my attention and keep what I have accomplished to date, and more importantly, how do I maintain what I will do next. Starting, or creating, the next good “habit” is easy, the tougher question is how do I do it, and hold it, and keep what I have accomplished so far.

The better way to think about it is how many habits, good practices, and good thoughts can I tend to? What structures can I put in place to help me maintain what I have? And once I have those structures and I have squeezed out some capacity to tend to more, then, and only then, what good practice should I pursue next?