Have you ever had a routine and gone on vacation somewhere else and suddenly you weren’t able to perform your routine, even though you wanted to? One of the reasons for not being able to follow through on an otherwise solid routine is your environment.
To create or keep a solid routine, we first need to understand that a routine consists of a set of behaviors. On top of that, we need to understand when human behavior occurs. Then we look at how the environment plays a role in determining human behavior. Lastly, we’ll know how to create rock-solid routines that will stick in any environment if you want.
A routine is a collection of habits. Habits in turn are simply repeated behaviors. Therefore a routine is just a collection of repeated behaviors. For us to understand our routine we need to understand behavior. Any human behavior occurs when motivation and ability converge at a high enough threshold when prompted. Where a prompt is the same thing as a cue.
The environment plays two giant roles in determining your behavior. First, the environment contains people who influence your behavior consciously and subconsciously. Because we’re social beings, we will be influenced to follow our peers’ actions to “fit in”. The second environmental factor is that it contains the cues for performing a behavior.
Because the environment contains the cues for us to perform a behavior we need to make sure that the same cue exists in our new environment to prompt us to perform the behaviors that are a part of our routine. If you really want to make the routine solid you use your previous behavior to prompt the new behavior.
There you have it! If you want to make sure that your routine sticks in all environments you need to create an initial cue that will be the same in all environments and then you simply chain the other behaviors in your routine to your previous action.
Great to be back with you!