Habit change coaching

Sometimes our clients know very much what they no longer want. They have developed a habit that they know is not leading them the life that they want to be living. It could be that they get annoyed with their co-worker, that they are sitting on the sofa after work rather than going for a walk, they might be eating too many sweets or overly concentrate on risks rather than opportunities. What all of these different topics have in common is that clients feel that they are somewhat not in control of what is happening, something automatic seems to be going on.

In such situations it might be helpful for the coach to find out what the client wants. Do they want to establish a new habit (what instead) to replace the old, or is there something “behind” the new habit that they would like to achieve. It may be that they don’t just want to be peaceful around their co-worker but are interested in peace of mind, generally. Or they want to be an active person rather than a couch-potato, or a person who is conscious of their diet and reap the health benefits. Instead of focusing on risks, they might want to become an optimistic person.

It is quite helpful to figure out at what level the client wants the change: is it around doing something different or is it about what the “doing differently” is going to achieve (which might be possible by other means). After asking “what instead” of the old habit, the coach might ask future focused questions like “if you develop this new habit what difference would it make to your life?” or “who would you become if you developed this new habit?” and then ask at which level, the level of action or the level of identity, the client wants to discuss their goal. If you make this decision without the input of your client you risk annoying them and coaching them on something that they don’t want to be coached about.

When the client wants to talk about concrete steps to develop the habit, we have found it useful to invite the client to examine a situation in light of past or future successes. You could ask about situations in which the client was able to do what they want to do (but usually don’t) very closely:

• How does this happen?

• What happens right before?

• What makes it more likely?

• Were there instances in which it almost happened?

If the client wants to talk more on the level of identity, you could invite them to explore what difference the new habit would make for them and their environment:

• Who would the client be if they naturally did what they wanted?

• Suppose they were this version of themselves … what difference would that make?

• What tells them that they can be this version of themselves?

• Who would be least surprised and what do theses people know about the client?

• What makes them (and the client)  confident?

• Have they ever gotten themselves to do something that they wanted to do but had a hard time implementing – how did they do that?

Another interesting move from narrative practice might be to invite an externalization of the “old habit”. You could ask the client a name for the old habit, for example “laziness” and ask:

• What is “laziness” keeping you from doing?

• What are you doing to minimize its influence?

• What would you like to say back to “laziness” when it arrives and wants to seduce you?

• What kind of relationship would you like with “laziness”?

One thing with habit change is that people usually assumes that it takes a long time to develop a new habit, and some modernist psychological research seems to support that (Lally et al., 2010). Coaching and other popular psychology publications sometimes assume a “90-day rule”. However, even the Lally et al.’s study reported an individual difference between 18-254 days. Also, the word “habit” is probably also used differently in different contexts. Instead of assuming difficulty right from the start, we might simply let go of any assumptions of “this is hard” or “this is easy” and accompany our client’s where they are. If they are having difficulties: this is normal for them. If it is easy: this is normal as well.

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Reference: Lally,P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How arehabits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world.EuropeanJournal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998–1009.https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.674

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