In this post, I'd like to talk about two things that have caught my attention this week: a strategy to practice writing and a strategy for building small habits.

How to Create New habits

I was recently advised by someone on a learning forum to read a book by Brian Jeffrey Fogg called “Tiny Habits.” He told me that it's a great tool for building regular habits for anything, including language learning. I’ve started reading it and, to be honest, I'm finding it quite interesting. It offers a lot of advice about approaches that can help not only build healthy habits but also eliminate bad ones.

Here are some key takeaways from the book that I've written out so that I can remember them better:

Keep a positive attitude. If we want to achieve our goals, we should keep in mind that we're  the masters of our behaviour and attitudes. It doesn’t make sense to be hard on ourselves or sink into despair when we don’t perform as we intend.

Don’t rely on motivation and willpower. These are too shaky concepts that have nothing to do with long-term goals. At times, we can be motivated and achieve even more than we’d planned, while other times we don’t have enough energy and can just sleep in and binge-watch Netflix. Instead of letting our willpower control our behaviour, we should rely on small, regular habits, since they help us accomplish more in the long run, regardless of whether we have the motivation or not.

Take small steps. There's a popular delusion that to succeed we have to do radical, bold, and complicated things. However, that only leads to self-criticism and disappointment. If we want to build a positive streak and maintain regular habits, it’s better to take small steps: do 5 minutes of exercise instead of 30 minutes, or write one page of text instead of a whole article.

To create new habits, you can follow these steps:

1) Clarify your aspiration.

2) Decide what kind of behaviour will help you achieve your aspiration and write out 8-10 possible habits.

3) Choose 2-3 habits from the list for your everyday life.

As an example, let’s imagine I want to write in a foreign language every day. To make it more manageable, I clarify my aspiration to write only 500 words every day. Then, I brainstorm possible habits that can prompt me to write and narrow down the list to three habits:

1) Drink a cup of coffee before writing.

2) Brainstorm some ideas for posts.

3) Open the document and create a post outline.

In theory, these habits will help me write 500 words in English without hesitation every day. I don’t know if it’s a workable strategy yet, so I'll report back on the results of my experiment later on.

Writing Practice

Another thing that has been on my mind for the past week is writing practice itself. A couple of native English speakers, after seeing and correcting my English posts, concluded that since I've reached an intermediate level, it would be better for me to devote more time to writing practice than to immersion with books and podcasts. As they explained, at this point, deliberate and longer writing practice will help me improve my writing more than listening/reading. I still unsure whether I should follow this strategy, so  I still haven't decided one way or the other. It would be great to hear more opinions and advice from other language learners.