Even if you've stumbled on your New Year's Resolutions you can still supercharge your habit formation skills.

But to do so, I'm going to ask you to think like a behavioral scientist.

I need you to admit exercise-before-work isn't a one step exercise-before-work habit. It entails choosing between old T-shirts and smelly gym shirts, choosing treadmill or elliptical, learning to eat breakfast during your morning meeting, and dozens of other decisions and adjustments.

Literally speaking, your brain doesn't, "know how to do" the simple thing - until you actually do it.

So before you make your massive habit tracker or start cluttering your house laying out all your gym clothes and journals so you stumble into everything you're supposed to do, DO THIS ONE THING ONCE!

Procedural Memory Visualization

1. Close your eyes and imagine yourself carrying out all the KEY BEHAVIORS

2. Define the short recipe-list of actions that enable/carry-out this habit

3. Repeat your short memorized action-list when it's go-time.

The person who repeats, "Shoes, Shorts, Treadmill, Go" instead of, "should I go to the gym today?" makes it to the gym with 90% less effort.

Falling into analysis mode is death to any new habit. By visualizing the key actions you prime the upper motor neurons that will be responsible for the behavior you want and then by committing a procedural list to memory, you give yourself a neuronal grappling hook that can literally pull you out of analysis and procrastination brain into the action mode part of the brain.

A single session of procedural memory visualization can multiply your habit completion rate.