Elastic Habits

Adding flexibility to the consistency foundation of Mini Habits, the process in this book provides a new strategy to make greater progress toward new habit formation.

The Elastic Habits strategy is founded upon flexibility. 

To maximize your potential each day, you need to be both reactive and proactive.

Stephen Guise, the author, provides a framework that includes the small steps that enable consistency and confidence while including the freedom to choose bigger daily goals.  

He suggests a process of establishing options in a 9-box framework provides flexibility that allows us to daily choose the goal we’re most motivated to do and provides a way for goal sizes to work together.  

Each of the nine goals has a different motivational profile. 

Goal sizes are situationally good or bad for your motivation.

The Four Pillars of Elastic Habits (Structure)

1. Elastic Habits are to be done every day
2. Elastic habits have a limited number of lateral and vertical success points
3. Elastic habits need to be tracked
4. Have no more than three elastic habits at one time

Elastic Habits in Seven Easy Steps

1. Choose (up to) three habits
2. Choose (about) three lateral options per habit.
3. Choose (up to) three vertical targets for each lateral option.
4. Choose your cue(s) and commit.
5. Display your habits.
6. Track your habits.
7. Score and evaluate your performance (optional). 

Succeeding with a mini-habit builds confidence and a foundation for creating momentum toward the ultimate goal. The process outlined in Elastic Habits adds flexibility that can be useful at times when you want to do more, or something different that contributes to your goal.

Here is a structure for a worksheet:

This is a great book to provide structure pragmatically.  If you haven’t read Mini Habits yet, you can skip it and go straight to this book.  The mini habit  foundation is fully described in this book and expanded on.