Let's talk about habit forming. Something I hear all the time from many students is "I want to practice but I find it really hard to establish a new habit in my life."

Habits require three things to form: they need a cue, an action, and a reward. The cue can be anything! It can be the time of day (at 8am I'm going to practice my voice); it can be an alarm on your phone; or, it can be connected to another existing habit (after I make my bed, I practice my voice). The action can be whatever habit you want to do, so in this case, practice my voice, and then I get the reward.

Now here is the tricky part: a lot of people think about the cue, or about the action, but forget about the reward. Without the reward, your brain will not establish a new habit because your brain is a reward seeking machine; all it wants to do is get the rewards! The reward can be anything. It can be checking something off a list. When you're brushing your teeth, you get a little minty flavour. That's the reward for brushing your teeth.

There's lots of ways to set up a reward for an action, and what I want to share with you today is a tool that I use for establishing new habits in my life. That tool is called Habitica.

Habitica is an online productivity platform, but it's like Dungeons & Dragons for productivity nerds. If you watch the video above, I'll show you a demo. Basically it's a website where you have a little character. Mine is riding a tiger and in a wheelchair at the same time. Every time you do one of your habits, you gain gold. In the video demonstration I say I did my meditation and you can see me get gold points and some experience points. Even just doing the demonstration for the video made me feel the reward!

There's lots of ways you can set this up. I have this set up so that when I do a good habit, I get positive reinforcement. When I do my morning pages, I get levelled up. You can also find items like Red Hatching Potion!

You can have tasks that you have to do every day, or your to do list. Then, as you accumulate gold for all the things you've done, you can purchase rewards. In the video you can watch me buy some party robes with the gold I scored from completing my tasks.

I really love Habitica. I think it's a super fun way to gamify your life. You can make parties with other people and then do quests together by doing the things you need to be doing anyway. This is not sponsored content! It's just a tool I really use and really love. Check it out for yourself here!