To Make A Change, Try Micro Habits

The biggest mistake my clients make when attempting change is trying to implement a wholesale, top-to-bottom reset. Bill Gates once said, “Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in ten years.” What that means is go big but do it in a reasonable time frame. Complete transformation overnight is not realistic—and your lack of progress against your goal will discourage you. When participants in my workshops analyze their Time Portfolio, many are sobered to realize they’re time-broke, focusing on less productive and meaningful activities and not on their key goals. As hard-charging Type A’s, they immediately resolve to detox from all devices, chisel their bodies into shape with grueling daily workouts and catch up on past commitments overnight. They aim to ingest the new macro habit in one giant gulp. Clearly, if it was as easy as that, they would have already reached these objectives, and many more. But change doesn’t work that way, not change that sticks. Crash diets might squeeze us into a dress or tuxedo next week, but research shows that 70 to 90 percent of people gain their pounds right back, plus more. We want real, lasting change, not a spike-and-crash cycle.

Enter Micro Habits.

Micro Habits are big habits broken into ridiculously small steps. They’re the building blocks of new macro habits; in essence, a habit to create a habit. The two essential ingredients for a Micro Habit are:

1. Perform it daily

2. Keep it small

That’s it. Daily, because you’re carving new neural pathways that form only with repetition. Small, because they’re tiny enough to sneak past our defense systems and start to inoculate us against change resistance.

This small initial step should take no more than one to two minutes to complete. I encourage clients to think of this as a limbo contest: How low can you go? Lower the bar for a new habit’s size until it’s so low you laugh out loud. Want to get in better shape and run a marathon, but the only marathon you currently engage in is a Netflix binge? Start by establishing a Micro Habit of putting on your sneakers once a day and walking up and down the steps of your front porch. Aiming to clean your messy closet? Start by folding one sweater. Looking to start a meditation practice? Begin with one mindful breath. It sounds absurd, but it works.

Here are a few real-life examples from my clients:

• After receiving some particularly stinging feedback in his 360 about tuning out in meetings if the topic did not directly apply to his department, Haoyu established a goal of listening better. His Micro Habit was to attend one meeting each day without devices.
• To temper her rescuer urges, Inge committed to a goal of once per day asking someone else for their ideas of how to solve a problem rather than jumping in with her superhero cape flying.
• To bypass his “do it perfectly or not at all” hurdle to keeping up with industry news, Joseph committed to reading just one paragraph in an industry publication each night.
• A chronic yes-sayer who was loath to miss out on anything (and therefore overburdened with work), Morgan’s Micro Habit was to respond once per day with “Let me think about that and get back to you.”
• To moderate her lightning-fast responses, which were generating misunderstandings, and instead become more intentional, Andrea established the daily morning habit of writing out one important problem she needed to tackle that day before checking her phone for messages and requests from others.

By being low stakes, Micro Habits are a safe experiment. They allow you to see what happens if you break the habit loop and step outside your comfort zone. Did the sky fall if you said no to one invitation? Did you miss out on anything that urgent if you did not check your email during one meeting?

The low-stakes nature of Micro Habits also bolsters our resilience. We build resilience through recovering from failure. Fall down, get up, repeat: that’s the process for establishing better adaptive responses to pressure. It’s also the way we learned how to walk when young. Did we give up and tell ourselves we were failures because we fell? We probably laughed and tried it again. It’s the same way we build musculature now: stress the muscle and create tiny tears in the fibers, which then recover stronger and better equipped to lift heavier weights the next go-around. The process of recovering from failure also builds the prefrontal cortex—the area associated with regulating emotions and decision-making—and tamps down the amygdala—which triggers fight-or-flight reactivity. So failure is not necessarily a bad thing. Sociologist Dr. Christine Carter says unless we’re willing to be bad at first, it’s hard to feel good about adopting a new habit. With a Micro Habit we fail small and recover more easily.

When I introduce the practice of Micro Habits, clients will often scoff. They raise an eyebrow and say, “But Sabina, this is ridiculous. I can’t do only one push-up a day!” That’s when I know they’ve identified a true Micro Habit. If it feels utterly ridiculous, you’re on target. Try this process right now:

1. Think of a goal you want to achieve. It can be anything, professional or personal.

2. Next, think of one step you can take to make progress on it.

3. STOP RIGHT THERE.

4. Now halve the size of that step, then slash it again, and then a little more.

5. Keep going until it almost takes more effort to write out the Micro Habit than it will take to do it. You might laugh at the size of this new habit. If you consider it too puny to share with anyone, you’re there.

6. Now trying doing it every day without fail.

Making your new habit truly micro improves the odds you’ll stick to it, because the only thing more ridiculous than this tiny habit is not accomplishing such a miniscule task. But the impact of those minuscule tasks adds up quickly. As author and columnist Arianna Huffington says, “By making very small changes, you have the power to change your life.”

Pro Tips for Succeeding in Micro Habits

1. Change the scenery. Switching venue has been proven to improve the chance of success in altering habits. Outside our usual surroundings, our brains disconnect from their automated wiring. Contextual cues in our familiar surroundings are triggers for automated habits. If you rarely eat Peanut M&Ms other than when you go to the theater but can think of nothing other than those crunchy colorful candies the minute you take your seat before the show starts, that’s what I mean by a “contextual cue.” Put this tip into practice by physically moving out of the space where the usual behaviors play out and choosing a new one in which to practice your Micro Habit. If your Micro Habit is to spend less time scrolling through your phone, for instance, and you generally do that while eating lunch at your desk, go sit in the cafeteria at lunchtime and talk to someone instead.

2. Piggyback the habit. Create new contextual cues by linking your Micro Habit to an existing routine. Learn one new word in a foreign language while brushing your teeth. Write your strategic intention for the day while drinking your morning coffee. Do your one paragraph of reading on your train ride home.

3. Track it. After you complete your Micro Habit for the day, be sure to physically note its completion.

4. Stay small for longer than you think you need to. Before you declare victory and increase the size of your new activity, hold steady for at least four weeks to fully ingrain the habit. If we extend our reach too fast, we will fail more readily and then give it up the next day. Productive failure is one thing; setting oneself up for futility is another. Leave yourself looking forward to the next day, excited to pick up where you left off rather than feeling too discouraged to tackle what felt onerous the day before. Many of my über-successful clients fail at some point in their Micro Habit journey because they try to go from micro to medium to macro too fast. If you find yourself in this situation, simply go back to the original micro-sized habit.

5. If you’re not succeeding, go smaller. Slash and then slash again. The smaller the habit, the greater your likelihood to stick with it and build the stamina to keep going. Again, if that feels ridiculous to you, remember that a ridiculously small change is better than none at all.

Excerpted from You’re the Boss by Sabina Nawaz. Copyright 2025 © by Sabina Nawaz. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, LLC