Start a new habit during a bigger transition

- Now a question that comes up all the time, of course, is, "Okay, I want to start a good new habit, "but when do I begin? "Where do I begin? "How do I begin?" Now, the strategy of the clean slate is one of the best times to begin, and this is the strategy that takes advantage of the fact that whenever we have a major transition, all our old habits are wiped away until new habits can crowd in much more easily. Now this can be any kind of transition. It can be a transition in a relationship, like a marriage, a divorce, a new baby, a new puppy, a new boss. It could be a transition of circumstances. A new job, a new city, a new school, and sometimes, even the smallest transitions can end up wiping the slate clean in a way that allows us to form a new habit. Now the thing that's frustrating about the clean slate is it's not something that's available to us at all times. We have to be going through a transition, but we want to be very aware of when we're go, of how to take advantage of it so that we don't let the opportunity slide. So for example, after I graduated from law school, I was going to start a clerkship, and I decided that I was going to go to the gym every morning before work, and very smart, because I had not understood the power of the clean slate at this point, the very first week that I was on the new job, I went to the gym before work. Now it could have been very easy for me to say to myself something like, "Well, it's really stressful and tiring to start a new job, "so I'm going to let myself settle in for a week or two, "and then I'll start trying to go to the gym before work." Big mistake. Because how we start is very much how we continue, and if I had had those first two weeks not going to the gym, that would have felt like the default. That would have felt like a normal day and getting up earlier and schlepping down there earlier and going to the gym before work would have felt like a major imposition. But because that's what I had done from the very first day, that seemed natural. That seemed like my natural default day was to go to the gym and then go to work. So whenever you are going through a transition, you want to start the way you want to begin. Just the way in college where you sat in class on the first day was probably the seat that you sat in for the rest of the semester. You want to start as you want to continue. So I talked to someone who was a big workaholic and he said, "In my new job, "I'm going to absolutely, positively leave every day "by seven o'clock except for the first couple of weeks "when I'm settling in where I think I'm going to stay "a little bit later so that I can get used to everything." And I said, "No. "If you want your habit to be leaving at seven o'clock, "you got to do that from the very first day." You got to put that in at the beginning when it's the easiest to change a transition. Now sometimes these transitions can look very silly and might not even be recognized as transitions, but they're still powerful. You always want to be on the lookout for a possible transition to use. I talked to a woman who said, "Oh, every day on the way home from work, "I stop and get fast food. "It's like my car has a mind of its own. "I'm not even controlling the steering wheel. "It's just pulling off to buy me this fast food. "I cannot help myself." But then she got a new car and she said it crossed her mind, with this new car, I'm not going to eat fast food in this new car, and that was all the transition she made. So maybe you have a new boss and you might say to yourself, you know what, I've really had a bad habit of coming late to staff meetings, but with this new boss, I'm going to be on time every single time. And that transition, that new person, that new atmosphere might help you keep a habit effortlessly, even something that had been a challenge to you before. So you want to be on the lookout for this transition so you can use the strategy of the clean slate to your advantage.