Happiness Challenge – Aware

Michelle LaBrosse, CCPM, PMP, PMI-ACP, RYT

BJ Fogg's Behavioral Model helps me become aware of why I sometimes resist doing the Happiness Yoga Flow.

BJ Fogg’s Behavioral Model helps me become aware of why I sometimes resist doing the Happiness Yoga Flow.

I was reflecting on how aware I am of the issue of resisting doing the happiness yoga flow.  Over the weekend during the Inspired Eagle Yoga and Gastronomy retreat we were discussing how it takes 66 days to create a new habit.  The common retort is I thought it only took 21 days.  So my response was “well if you have the new habit down in 21 days, then of course the next 45 days will be easy as whatever you were trying to make into a habit, will already be a habit.” So I’m only into day 10 of this and it’s not yet a daily habit, so maybe it’s just normal I’d have some resistance.   I always think back to brushing and flossing my teeth – that is such an easy habit but it really only takes two minutes a couple times a day.  This one takes 15 minutes if I rush through it and half an hour if I’m more deliberate in what I’m doing.

BJ Fogg – a professor of Persuasive Technology at Stanford has this model he calls B=MAT.This means your behavior (your habits) is related to your motivation, your abilities and your triggers.  I’m not as motivated as I could be and while I do have the ability to do yoga, taking the time to do it is another story.  Since it does take more time than brushing my teeth, the feeling is it’s not that easy a habit to adopt as it takes a lot of time (it really doesn’t but this is my excuse). And some days I’m more motivated to do yoga than others (if I have a little bit of pain I’m actually more motivated to do yoga then when I’m feeling great).  I could use help in all three areas – making it easier to do, improving my motivation so I’m consistently enthusiastically engaged in doing yoga, and in creating more triggers.  I do have the trigger of needing to write this blog post and I prefer to write the post after I do yoga.   I was reading how if you leave your exercise clothes out the night before, that is a trigger to get to the gym in the AM.  So if I  start leaving my yoga clothes out the night before then I’ll be more enthusiastically engaged in doing yoga the first thing in the morning – resolving all three of the MAT issues.  This could help me with days like today where I did everything but yoga until 5:30 PM.

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