Perhaps you’re a new B2B copywriter and you want to create good habits for your freelance business.
Or perhaps you’ve already set up some business-building habits, but have trouble making them stick…
Whether you’ve decided that your desired behavior is to “read for 20 minutes each day” or “connect with two new prospects each day,” it is likely your motivation will wane after a few weeks, or even a few days. You may feel guilty as a result and blame yourself for not ‘sticking it out.’
In his book Tiny Habits, BJ Fogg, founder of the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford University, tells us that when our motivation takes a dive, we are not at fault. Human nature is.
Why? Because motivation, a mix of negative emotions and positive emotions pushing against each other (such as fear vs. hope), fluctuates with time. Motivation is unreliable.
If you can’t rely on motivation, how do you create habits that stick for your writing business or personal life?
How to Design New Habits
BJ Fogg determined that any Behavior is a factor of Motivation, Ability, and Prompt:
B=MAP
With Motivation ‘out of the equation,’ Ability (how easy a behavior is), and Prompt (a very specific moment in time) are the two parameters you can safely rely on.
To design any new behavior, you must:
- Make the behavior very easy.
- Celebrate after each behavior.
Here’s what the recipe looks like:
After (prompt), I will (do very easy behavior), then I will (celebrate).
- Make the Behavior Very Easy
Say you want to create a habit of reading for 20 minutes each day, but somehow, you never seem to find the time. To make a behavior very easy, you must make it tiny. Instead of reading for 20 minutes, how about starting by reading for just a few seconds? How about reading a single sentence?
Sounds silly? Maybe. But it’s not.
Think about it. You’ve probably experienced it yourself. When you have a task to do, often the most difficult part is to get started. Designing a reading habit that takes only few seconds makes reading one sentence easy to do (and easy to do again).
- Celebrate to Make the Habit Stick
BJ Fogg tells us that emotion (not reward, incentive, or repetition) is what makes habits stick, and that we “change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad.”
He found out that the feeling of success wires habits into your brain by releasing dopamine, a neurotransmitter that makes you feel good and helps you remember and repeat the behavior.
I found celebrating the most difficult aspect of designing new habits, because it’s a feeling you must create within yourself (e.g., by doing a fist pump).
In the free five-day online program based on the book, I learned about celebrations focused on business or life purpose, and that made celebrating easier.
The good news is that you only need to celebrate until the habit sticks. Once the habit is wired in, celebration is optional.
Applying Tiny Habits to Your Freelance Business
Freelance writers must wear many hats and there is no shortage of business areas you could apply the Tiny Habits method to. Skills, marketing, and productivity are key areas of focus.
Here are two examples of habits that could help your business.
- A Tiny Reading Habit to Grow Your Craft
Say you’re a new B2B copywriter, and you want to become an expert in your field. You decide you should read the copywriting books everyone talks about.
A “tiny marketing recipe” for your desired habit could involve these three steps:
After I sit down for my coffee break,
I will read one sentence of Ogilvy on Advertising,
Then I will say, “Yes! This habit helps me become a copywriting expert.”
Even when you don’t feel like reading more than one sentence, you’re on your way to success. Because you feel good about it, your habit grows into reading a paragraph, then a page. Soon enough, you will have read the entire book.
And because you feel good about that, next you may study a new copywriting course. Your reading habit multiplies into other positive habits that help fuel your business.
Like plants, habits naturally grow and multiply, helping you build success momentum.
- A Tiny Marketing Habit to Grow Your Income
Prospecting is another area of importance, dreaded by many copywriters.
A common pitfall for freelancers is to do marketing in-between client projects only. This inevitably leads to periods of work followed by periods of inactivity which kill your business momentum.
Ilise Benun of Marketing Mentor suggests that to avoid this feast-or-famine syndrome, it is important to do marketing every single day.
B2B copywriting expert Steve Slaunwhite also suggests you keep your marketing very simple if you are a new B2B writer or copywriter.
A “tiny marketing recipe” for a new B2B copywriting business might look like this:
After I turn on my phone in the morning,
I will open the LinkedIn app,
Then I will say, “Way to go! This habit helps me land B2B clients.”
Every day, you open LinkedIn, close it immediately, then celebrate that tiny (if slightly ridiculous) step. On most days, once the app is open — helped by your natural curiosity (and your desire to grow an income!) — you will feel compelled to do more, such as reading posts, commenting, and yes, asking people to connect with you until your habit slowly grows to those “two new prospects a day” we talked about earlier.
If you’re new, a tiny marketing plan comprising one or two tiny habits recipes is probably enough to get you started.
Here’s the important part. During any ”off” day, where you’re just not feeling it, you can always revert to the scaled back (original) version of your behavior, such as simply opening and closing the app (which takes a few seconds), and patting yourself on the back. Celebrating is important to build success momentum, but also to keep other negative emotions at bay (such as fear of failure) when the going gets tough.
Designing New Habits Is a Skill
It takes a little time to learn how to design new habits. It took me two weeks to wire in three tiny habits with the free online coaching program.
The first week I learned that some habits I had designed with the help of the book needed a better prompt, others a more specific behavior.
The second week allowed me to practice scaling back (rather than skip a tiny behavior) when I feel I don’t have the mental space for it. It only takes a few seconds, and ticking that box feels great.
Finding the right tiny habit to “plant” in the right moment of your day requires playing with different prompts and behaviors until you find the habits that work for you.
It’s all about experimentation, and working on “feeling good, rather than feeling bad.”
Which area of your business would benefit most from the Tiny Habits method?
