Chaining: A Way to Keep Going
Monday, July 21, 2008 at 23:50 Most of us have some goals which we would like to keep going on a daily basis - it may be going for a run, or doing our piano practice, or tidying the office, or any of thousands of possible actions which we feel will leave us better off physically, mentally or financially.
Some of these may be negative goals, in that we want not to do something on a daily basis, like smoke cigarettes, eat chocolate or drink coffee.
So we are either trying to establish a new habit or break an existing one.
The trouble with these types of goals is that they often are very difficult to keep going. We usually start off with the best of intentions, keep going for a week or two and then miss a day. Then it’s a shorter period until we miss another day and that turns into two days, and before we know it we have given up the goal altogether. All we have achieved is to make ourselves feel guilty!
How can you motivate yourself to do better than this?
There is a simple method called “Chaining” which can greatly increase your chances of success. It takes the form of competing against yourself to produce the longest chain of days in which you succeeded with your goal.
For example, if your goal is to practise the piano daily you manage to carry this out for two weeks and then miss a day. You have made a chain of fourteen days. Now your aim is to beat your record of fourteen days.
The great advantage of chaining is that it recognises that we are almost certain to fail sometimes, but this a positive as it allows us to compete with ourselves to get better and better.
So why not give it a try? Select one goal (positive or negative) which you would like to establish in your life and see how long a chain you can make. There’s even a website to help you do this:
www.joesgoals.comGet your first goal well established before taking on another. Having too many goals going at once will dilute the effect.
Let me know how you get on!
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Reader Comments (9)
It has three types of chains, per day-based, per-week based, and per-month based.
I already knew the core concept as 'Seinfeld's Chain' (although it's probably much older than Jerry Seinfeld), but it didn't come to my mind that one could put a failure to good use.
Thanks for the tip!
I'd love to know your (and your readers') thoughts on why game playing is so effective in creating change when all supposedly 'sophisticated' conscious attempts tend to fail?
Writing some more on the psychology of game playing here if you or your readers have any thoughts/ comments: http://justseventhings.com/2008/08/11/the-psychology-of-game-playing-creating-good-habits-having-great-thoughts/
Cheers
Si
our predecessors were much better than we are at working hard for the sake of working hard and not wondering why it isn't more fun. Maybe they just made it fun, I don't know. Are we spoiled compared to them? Maybe. But if they needed games, they had simpler omes, I think. Games of heart or the head rather than of the eyes and hands.
Interesting question. Of course if your choice is "work or starve" that does concentrate the mind wonderfully!
But I think our ancestors often had equivalent methods of making it easier to keep going. Things like communal work songs for instance. Remember the final scene of "Seven Samurai" where the peasants are singing while they work in the field, and the surviving samurai realise that life goes on and that they are now just spectators.