What if struggling to stick with a habit isn't only about willpower or discipline — but how well the habit has been designed?

In this episode of The Practice Ground, Ken and Kari explore James Clear's four-stage habit loop from Atomic Habits — cue, craving, response, and reward — and what it can look like to deliberately design and train that sequence in real life.

Ken turns the conversation into a case study, asking Kari to deconstruct her experiment with running: Could she design the sequence well enough that running became not only easier to initiate, but rewarding enough that she wanted to keep repeating and training it?

Said differently: Can a desired behavior be trained until it becomes predictable?

And what does designing a behavior even look like?

What you'll hear inside the episode:

• how the cue-craving-response-reward habit loop can be used as a framework for designing and training habits
• why designing a habit and training a habit are two different parts of the process
• Kari's real-life experiment with designing and training a running habit
• why Kari deliberately designed the response to include not only what she would do, but how she would respond to mental chatter and physical resistance before, during, and after the run
• what happened when she began training zero mental negotiation rather than allowing thoughts and resistance to determine whether she followed through
  why the reward may matter not only after a behavior, but in whether we want to repeat it
• how repetition can begin changing what we expect ourselves to do when a familiar cue arises
• why observing, testing, and refining a habit sequence can be more useful than judging yourself when it doesn't work

Cited in this episode:

Book | Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones

Podcast | The Diary of a CEO - Steven Bartlett's conversation with James Clear

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Ken Li is a confidence coach. Connect with Ken on LinkedIn, where he regularly shares mindset tools, resources, and strategies to help professionals who second-guess themselves feel as confident inside as they look.

Kari Watterson is a mindset and habits coach. Connect with Kari on Instagram (@theadhdhabittrainer). where she shares her ongoing series, The Habit Training Diaries.