It’s February, and for a lot of us that means the motivation to keep up with our New Year’s resolution is starting to dwindle. Unfortunately, building a habit isn’t as simple as “just doing it” but it’s not impossible either.
With Ramadan around the corner, one of my goals is to consistently pray on time so that I can start to feel the spiritual benefits of praying.
(Allhumdolilah, I received some amazing messages after I shared my experience about building a prayer habit in part 1 of this post.)
So I decided to pick up where I left off and invite everyone to join me in making my Ramadan goal a reality. After some research about what strategies help people build habits successfully, I found that the most popular habit people attempt to make is one that involves exercise. Subsequently, there have been TONS of trials done to try and figure out the best strategy.
So when looking at the research, the most successful programs had the following components to it:
- Goal with a time frame mapped out
- Week by week progression in difficulty
- Accountability
I wanted to take these three components and create a prayer challenge. Here is what I came up with. I made a 8weekchallenge printable!
GOAL AND TIME FRAME
I decided to choose an 8 week time frame with the end goal being reading all prayers on time. Why 8 weeks? If you read part 1 of this post, you saw that research shows that it takes at least 2 months to make a habit. Therefore, I decided to make the time frame 8 weeks or approximately 2 months.
WEEK-BY-WEEK PROGRESSION
Each week the goal will be small. This is one small aspect in building a good prayer habit that we work on. This way, we won’t feel overwhelmed and lose our motivation. In the printable for each week with the goal written on the bottom. For each day, you will mark your progress on each of the prayers. That way you can easily see your own success as the week goes on.
I suggest placing the printable in a place that you access multiple times a day. I like to place it in my planner because I check my planner throughout the day. Other places could be in your prayer mat itself, so that after you’ve prayed you can check it off. Or maybe on the fridge, so that you see it every time you go grab something to eat. Having it visually there will not only serve as motivation to tick of each box every day, but also serve as a reminder to pray through out the day.
ACOUNTABILITY
In my opinion, this is the most important aspect of any habit building. Accountability taps into our innate nature to not let others down. It’s that “we are all in this together” mentality. For accountability I want to use social media as our medium. We will have a secret Facebook group where we can post our progress and share tips with each other. Our best cheerleaders are our peers. So lets help each other build a better prayer habit together!
So how do you join? Simple.
- Follow/Like @zairzabrplay and @azyaanjewelery
- Sign up with your email address here.
- On Feb. 19th we will begin our challenge and email you a link to the facebook group along with a printable.
