How Habit Stacking Can Help Busy Executive Women Supercharge Their Success

There are many challenges to being a successful executive and managing your personal and professional responsibilities. With so much to focus on, trying to introduce a new habit into your routine can seem daunting.

Habit stacking is a life saver for executive women who want to improve their personal or professional lives without sacrificing the quality of what they currently achieve on a daily basis. It’s a low-stress way to supercharge their success without taking time away from other tasks.

What is Habit Stacking?

Everyone has habits, whether you realize you have them or not. Choosing to pour cereal before your milk, what you reach for first in the morning and how you travel to work are all habits.

Some habits are neutral and don’t impact your quality of life. Others, however, could contribute to your stress, fatigue and well-being.

Research shows that only half of people keep their New Year’s resolutions, showing how bad humans are at creating positive habits. Habit stacking is a way to hack that.

Habit stacking connects your desire to improve your organization habits, heath or leadership skills to a pattern you previously established. You get used to performing the task while doing the one you’re used to, and you form a new habit. You can create positive habits by consistently doing them simultaneously and in the same setting.

By connecting a new habit to an old one, your brain combines the two and the new behavior gets ingrained. Author S.J. Scott popularized “habit-stacking” in the professionally-backed book Habit Stacking: 97 Small Life Changes That Take Five Minutes or Less. Since then, it’s become a tool for people to accomplish their goals.

Here are five ways habit stacking can help busy executives.

1. It Increases Focus

When you habit stack, you can improve your ability to focus on essential tasks. It can be hard to complete the steps in your routine without your mind wandering to other things you must do. Habit stacking is a great way to incorporate mindfulness and meditation into your life, helping you focus on the present moment.

Introducing a new habit into your life can seem daunting. Since habit stacking connects the new task to another routine, it is easier to add to your life. Instead of stressing about not doing it, you can focus on how well you’re doing with the new habit and what you can improve. For example, if you want to start bullet journaling, you can do so while you wait for your morning coffee to brew.

2. You Can Better Commit to Your Goals

Habit stacking makes it much easier to commit to what you desire. Sliding things into your other habits instead of creating a separate one makes achieving your goals easier.

If you want to stay hydrated but forget to drink water, habit stacking can help. Stack drinking a glass of water as you check your email. Doing so will help you meet your hydration goals without interfering with other parts of your day.

3. It Helps You Stay Organized

As an executive, you know the organization is a must. However, staying consistently organized is easier said than done. Habit stacking can be an excellent tool for managing your office and being punctual for important meetings and events.

With habit stacking, you can condition your brain to put things where they need to go and adequately prepare for your activities. Putting your pens back in their drawer is easier when you stack it by shutting down your computer for the evening. You can put your files away when you walk out of your office for the evening. Stack the things you often forget with the things you don’t for success.

4. You Can Effectively Prioritize

If you want to change your priorities but get stuck in a negative routine, habit-stacking can help. Connect one of the positive habits to your negative ones. If you bite your nails to handle stress, you can stack it to get up and take a walk. Eventually, the nail biting habit could turn into taking a walk instead.

As an executive, it can be hard to juggle important tasks, but by stacking the most important ones with your routine, you can complete them with haste.

5. It Promotes Healthier Coping Mechanisms

Life gets stressful, especially with the responsibilities of managing a company. Stacking your habits can help you introduce positive coping mechanisms to reduce stress. For example, you could listen to a chapter of your favorite audiobook while prepping your lunch.

Self-care is a vital tool for everyone, especially when you have the responsibilities of being an executive. The industry still has inappropriate biases, making you work harder for success. Incorporating habits that aid your body and mind can help you feel less stress, reduce symptoms of mental illness and allow you to live a more peaceful life.

Using Habit Stacking to Supercharge Your Success

Habit stacking effectively adds healthy habits into your life that support your personal and professional growth. Connecting a current pattern with one you want to implement can start you on the path to success.

By: Beth Rush is the career and finance editor at Body+Mind. She has 5+ years of experience writing about the power of human design to reveal entrepreneurial potential and time management strategies. She also writes about using the emotion of awe to activate our leadership prowess. You can find her on Twitter @bodymindmag. Subscribe to Body+Mind for more posts by Beth Rush.

(Guest Contribution: The opinions and views of guest contributions are not necessarily those of theglasshammer.com).