This method has helped me a lot at work and with family, and I wish I could remember to use it all the time.
Just keep on using it as much as you can, perhaps periodically reminding yourself, and the habit will reinforce itself.
If you want to improve faster, you could try something like Benjamin Franklin’s incredibly nerdy method: he would pick some good habit to reinforce (or bad one to avoid) and he would remind himself of this daily. Every time he fell short of his goal, he would make a check mark on a spreadsheet. When he’d gone a week without a single check mark, he would proceed on to the next habit on his list.
(Irrelevant story: Back in high school English class, we were assigned two essays about morality from the same time period. One was Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, which was every bit as creepy as the title suggests. The other was Franklin’s description of his spreadseet-of-virtue experiment, which would not have been out of place as a top-level post on Less Wrong. Reading these together produced some of the most severe mood whiplash that is physically possible.)
Just keep on using it as much as you can, perhaps periodically reminding yourself, and the habit will reinforce itself.
If you want to improve faster, you could try something like Benjamin Franklin’s incredibly nerdy method: he would pick some good habit to reinforce (or bad one to avoid) and he would remind himself of this daily. Every time he fell short of his goal, he would make a check mark on a spreadsheet. When he’d gone a week without a single check mark, he would proceed on to the next habit on his list.
(Irrelevant story: Back in high school English class, we were assigned two essays about morality from the same time period. One was Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, which was every bit as creepy as the title suggests. The other was Franklin’s description of his spreadseet-of-virtue experiment, which would not have been out of place as a top-level post on Less Wrong. Reading these together produced some of the most severe mood whiplash that is physically possible.)