How to Win Client Business When You Don't Know Where to Start

CHAPTER 22Making the Rainmaker Skills Stick : 66 Days That Will Shape Your Future

Each day must be approached as a unit; each must be lived with care; and if this is done, the procession of days will turn out all right.

—Louis L'Amour, writer, recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom

Dr. Maxwell Maltz noticed an interesting pattern among his surgery patients in the 1950s. What he found was that when he performed an operation, it took about 21 days for the patient to get used to the changes. When a patient had a leg amputated, for example, Dr. Maltz found that the person would sense a phantom limb for about three weeks before adjusting to life without it. According to Dr. Maltz, “These phenomena tend to show that it requires a minimum of 21 days for an old mental image to dissolve and a new one to form.”

And that's how the “it takes 21 days to form a new habit” myth began. You see this in the self‐help advice from gurus like Zig Ziglar and Tony Robbins. But new research suggests that it takes much longer.

In 2009, Dr. Phillippa Lally and her team at University College London set out to determine just how long it takes to form a new habit. In a study of 96 people over 12 weeks, Lally's team had each individual practice a new habit and report daily on whether they performed the new behavior and if it felt automatic.

Some people chose simple habits like “drinking a bottle of water with lunch”; others chose more difficult tasks like “running 15 minutes before dinner each ...