How curiosity can help us with making (and breaking) habits

About 10 months ago, a savvy someone suggested I start a new habit of writing regular blog articles for my website, both to share a little about how I communicate as a therapist, as well as to reflect on my work with clients. Since then, the practice has touched on all the hallmarks of how difficult a new habit can be to establish - initial good intentions, a flurry of productive activity, then a period of waning interest, followed by guilt, avoidance, and critical self-talk.

I mention this because this month, I’ve been having a crack (maybe my 6th or 7th) at finally finishing Atomic Habits, or at least getting past the fourth chapter. It’s a phenomenal book, yet my ability to consume self-help material has never been the greatest, so I mostly glare at it on the shelf for not just… infusing me with its knowledge, after I was so kind as to purchase it. (I’m supposed to actually read it as well? Outrageous.)

The early chapters are filled with great ideas, and this time round I’ve been particularly taken with the concept “You do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems”. This got me curious about why I’ve been struggling to establish my new blog writing habit, when I’ve had reasonable success with making and breaking some other habits in the last 12 months.

Practicing curiosity matters because for many of us, there is a powerful cycle between trying to change, hitting a roadblock, falling back on old strategies of avoidance, and resuming stagnation. Getting curious helps break that cycle, because curiosity can be described as the stance of withholding judgment because we haven’t got enough information yet, which gives us a real alternative to falling straight into self-critical conclusions. It’s asking questions about how we’re doing things rather than what we’ve done.

When you get curious about your systems, the remarkable thing is how quickly you might realise… “Oh, I don’t actually have any yet.” Or the ‘system’ which was meant to ensure success might be pretty fragile, because you expected yourself to create a foolproof pathway to success within 5 seconds of a new idea, skipped the planning stage, then blamed any failures on a lack of effort or personal character. As a recovering perfectionist, practicing this curiosity helped me notice that my goal to blog regularly (a new and mentally demanding activity) had mostly been held together with hope and optimism.

As an example of reflecting on ‘falling to the level of my systems’, I’m definitely noticing that my vague intention of ‘Sit for 2 hours every few weeks and bang out a Pulitzer-winning blog article’ has not been a helpful system for me, so I'm intending to try a system of sitting for shorter periods more often, to see whether frequent short spurts of writing will support regular blogging more effectively for me. I still haven’t figured out the ideal system to help me blog regularly, but active curiosity has been like a comma replacing a full stop - I’m now thinking about different approaches to try out, and actually feeling a bit hopeful I could find one that works for me.

What goals have left you feeling caught in a vicious cycle of effort and self-criticism, and how could you practice deliberate curiosity about systems that could support you with making those changes?