New Year, New Habits

A new year calls for new habits. Habits and routines have a negative connotation; but researchers have found that new habits are good for the brain, innovation, even creativity. Taking stock of your regular practices might raise your leadership game to a new level.

“Not choice, but habit rules the unreflecting herd,” said the poet William Wordsworth already in the 19th century. If leadership is about choice, about self-determination, about being in charge, then automatic habits are the opposite of leadership. Habits are for robots.

But brain researchers have discovered that when we adopt habits consciously, we create parallel synaptic paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks. This in turn helps prevent Alzheimer's and keep the brain's atrophy at bay.

Routines don’t have to be dull; they can be creative, and they can boost performance. Committed to improving the quality of its customer service, Citibank Privatkunden AG in Germany sought to cut waiting time for customers calling in from 20 seconds to 8 seconds. The bank instituted a practice for each employee to take five minutes on a given day to achieve a “wow” effect by exceeding one customer’s expectations.

The researchers found that the more new things we try—the more we step outside our comfort zone—the more creative we become, both at work and in our personal lives.

Which might be useful when you start a new year. Much more useful, in fact, than sincere New Year's Resolutions (see video) that are history by mid-January (in other words, right around now).



Regular practices can be annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly, or daily. Here are some examples:

Annual:

• On your birthday, take stock of your life accomplishment.
• At the end of each year, look at what worked and what didn’t work during the previous year, acknowledge your accomplishments of the past year, and create your goals for the coming year. 
• Every June, go for a medical check-up.

Monthly: 

• Review and update your displays of your progress toward major objectives.
• Pay your bills on the first of each month. 
• Answer your overdue correspondence on Facebook and other networks on the 15th each month.

Weekly: 

• Sundays, create your priorities for the coming week.
• Mondays, declare what you will not do that week. 
• Wednesdays, finish unfinished business and take care of administrative details.
• Fridays, speculate about new possibilities. 

Daily:

• Take a walk each evening.
• Read something each day that gives you a new perspective.

I invite you to take an inventory of your own habits: Which ones have been good for you, and which ones bad? Which ones were useful for getting you to where you are today, but are obsolete now? And which ones do you want to keep for the foreseeable future?

What if, for example, you took a new, unknown way to work, the road less traveled, as it were? What if you changed a familiar work routine or sequence of activities? What if you made time for "What If" speculation about the future on Friday mornings?

What do you think? What habits can you schedule regularly to prevent them from being dropped out of your life? What regular actions will fulfill your life? What new habits have you scheduled into your life or work, and with what results? I look forward to your comments on my blog.

May 2011 bring you even closer to your dreams,

P.S. If you have not yet had a chance to download my new book Leading Leaders: The Art and Science of Boosting Return on People (ROP), feel free to do so now. The book is my New Year's gift to you. For your personal copy, go to Leading-Leaders. (Or copy and paste this link into your browser: http://www.thomaszweifel.com/Landing-Leading-Leaders.html)