If you can’t stick to your habits, watch this.

Have you ever had the experience where you really want to engage in a behavior, but then you fail to actually do it? If you’re a human, I bet that this has happened to you. For instance, it may be that you want to go to the gym every day, but find yourself glued to your phone instead. Or maybe you plan to cook healthy meals for dinner every night, but instead end up eating junk food from your cupboard. So, why do we so often

Fail at doing the behaviors that we want? And what’s the solution to this? I’m going to teach you a powerful framework to help you figure out why you’re struggling to engage in a healthy behavior and how to make that healthy behavior stick. It’s called the 10 conditions for change. You can use it for your own behaviors or to help you understand the behaviors of other people such as your friends, loved ones, clients, or even patients. So, let’s

Jump into the 10 conditions for change framework. It starts with the observation that purposely creating a new behavior involves three phases. One, the decision phase. This is when you are deciding whether and when to engage in the behavior, such as how many healthy dinners you want to cook every week and which nights you want to cook them. Two, the action phase. This is when you are taking actions to put the behavior into practice, such as by buying ingredients,

Cooking those ingredients, and actually eating those healthy meals. Three, the continuation phase. This is where you keep your behavior over time. For instance, by maintaining your healthy cooking routine over a period of years. Let’s take a look at what each of these phases looks like for the case where the new behavior is exercising at the gym every day. First, we have the decision phase where we decide that we want to exercise. After that, we have the action

Phase where we pick a type of exercise, sign up for a gym membership, go to the gym on Monday, go to the gym on Tuesday, and so on. And finally, we have the continuation phase where we maintain motivation and don’t let our gym membership lapse. This is where the power of the 10 conditions for change framework comes in. The framework says you will be very likely to continue to engage in positive behaviors if 10 conditions are met. So to make the

Behavior happen, it’s simply enough to satisfy these 10 conditions. But there’s an easier way than focusing on all 10 conditions. We can see this by flipping the framework around. If the behavior isn’t happening, then that implies that very likely one or more of the conditions is not being met. So to get the behavior going, all we have to do is go through the 10 conditions, figure out which one or ones are not met, and focus on meeting those. Once we meet those

Missing conditions, the behavior is very likely to follow. So what are these 10 conditions? Well, after I walk you through each of them, I’ll show you how to apply the framework for yourself in a realistic situation. It may sound complex at first, but as you’ll see at the end of this video, it’s actually easy to apply. To get started, we begin with the decision phase where there are three conditions to meet. The question is, are all of these conditions met for

The behavior you’re trying to engage in? These conditions say that it’s important to one, consider the behavior, two, desire to engage in the behavior, and three, intend to engage in the behavior. If you’ve never before considered the behavior, then of course you’re not likely to start it. Furthermore, if you don’t desire to engage in the behavior, you have no reason to start. There are actually two types of desire we can have for our behavior. Intuitive desire,

Which is a gut level positive feeling about doing something, such as we might feel towards eating a donut. And reflective desire, which is a reason belief that something’s worthwhile to do, all things considered. For instance, you might have a reflective desire to work out daily because you know it’s healthy, even though you don’t actually enjoy working out. It’s best for a behavior change if you have both types of desire, but sometimes just one type is enough. But wait, if you’ve already

Considered a behavior and you already desire it, doesn’t that mean you automatically also intend to do it? Not necessarily. People often desire to do things without intending to do them. For instance, you might just feel you’re too busy right now to commit to this behavior. This brings us to the second phase, the action phase. It contains conditions four through nine. Condition four is remembering to perform each action. If you’re forgetting to go to the gym, that’s going to undermine your

Gym routine. Condition five is believing that doing the actions will help you achieve your goal. If the reason that you’re going to the gym is to get healthy, but you don’t actually believe that it’s healthy to go to the gym, it’s likely to undermine your routine. Condition six is choosing to perform each action instead of whatever other actions are available. If whenever it’s time to go to the gym, you watch Tik Tok instead, that’s going to be a problem.

Condition seven is knowing how to perform each action. If you go to the gym, but you don’t know how to use any of the equipment, you’re not going to be able to work out. Condition eight is having the needed resources to perform each action. For instance, if you can’t actually afford a gym membership, of course, you’re not going to be able to work out there. And finally, condition 9 is embodying the skills and traits needed to perform each action. For

Instance, if you’re physically disabled and the gym doesn’t have appropriate accommodations, you’re unfortunately not going to be able to use that gym. This brings us to the final phase, continuation. The idea here is simple. To keep the behavior going, it’s not enough to just temporarily meet the other nine conditions. It’s important to keep those conditions in place. So, the 10th and final condition is to maintain all the other conditions, which is absolutely essential to make sure the

Behavior continues. Okay, I know that sounds like a lot, but you’ll see it’s actually not so complicated to apply once we use a realistic example. So, let’s get into it. Suppose you have a goal of spending 2 hours every Sunday practicing learning Japanese. Unfortunately, you find you’re very rarely actually putting in those two hours. On many Sundays, you miss the practice altogether. And even when you do the practice, it’s often cut short. So, what’s going on here? And how do you

Engage in this behavior successfully? Well, let’s apply the 10 conditions for change to figure out the problem as well as a potential solution. First, let’s look at the decision phase. Have you ever considered the behavior of studying Japanese for two hours every Sunday? In this hypothetical scenario, yes, obviously. So, that condition is already met. Two, do you desire to engage in the behavior? Suppose that yes, you do. But reflecting on the two types of desire, you realize you don’t have intuitive

Desire to study Japanese. You don’t want it the way you want to eat a donut. You just have a reflective desire in the sense that you think it’s a good idea, all things considered. Recall what we talked about earlier. It’s best when you have both an intuitive and a reflective desire. But what can you do about this lack of intuitive desire? Well, it’s easy to figure out because we have a free website for the 10 conditions of

Change. It maps out all the different strategies you can use whenever a condition is not met. Just go to the link in the description below. Suppose that while browsing our website, you pick two strategies to help you increase your intuitive desire for studying Japanese. First, you decide to reward yourself with a delicious Japanese snack the moment you start studying each Sunday. Second, at the beginning of every session, you’ll spend 1 minute visualizing yourself visiting Tokyo and

Speaking with Japanese people there. This will help you build up your intuitive excitement for learning Japanese. Now, on to the third condition. Do you intend to practice Japanese every Sunday? Yes, you do. You plan to do it this coming Sunday as well as every Sunday after that. So, there’s no problem there. This brings us to the action phase. Reviewing these conditions to see if they’re met, you immediately notice an issue with the fourth condition. Remember, you sometimes

Simply forget to do your studying. Reviewing the strategies for this condition on the 10 conditions for change website, you decide on the notification strategy. You’ll set up a phone notification to go off each Sunday, an hour before studying begins, so that you don’t forget. Quickly reviewing conditions 5 through 9, you realize they are all met except for one, chooses. You sometimes choose to do other things rather than studying for two hours on Sundays. For instance, often in the middle of a session, you’ll

Be distracted by something else going on around you and you’ll stop studying. Reviewing the strategies on the 10 conditions for change website, you decide to use the new environment strategy. You’ll simply go to a local coffee shop for your Sunday studying. This dubtales nicely with the other strategy you decided on before since this coffee shop also sells Japanese snacks. Now you’re done. You’ve got your plan to get your behavior to stick. You have strategies for increasing your

Desire to study, preventing yourself from forgetting to study, and for making sure you don’t get distracted while you’re studying. Now, for the important part, if there’s a behavior that you’ve been struggling to get yourself to do, just hop onto the 10 conditions for change website. It’s completely free. Once you’ve identified which conditions are not met for your behavior, just click on the corresponding condition to get lots of ideas for strategies that you can apply to meet that condition. If

You found this interesting, I’d really appreciate it if you’d subscribe. And you can check out the 10 conditions for change website in the description box below.