A Personal Example of Changing Mindset by Creating a Habit

A few years back, I wanted to start eating steel-cut oatmeal for breakfast. I had high cholesterol. I believed this lifestyle-change would impact it in a beneficial way. If I was right (I was) it would obviate the need for statins.

After languishing in excuses for a while, I decided it was a matter of discipline. I was going to do it. I would eat oatmeal every day for a week.

A Trick for Retraining Yourself

Previously, I suggested that one way to change your mind is to start with a discipline, evolve it into an habit, and let the habit reprogram your thinking.

Getting through the discipline phase can sometimes be challenging. In my experience, old habits try to reassert themselves a lot in this phase and sometimes they succeed.

When this happens, one trick that I used was to always undo whatever I did and redo it using the discipline I'm adopting.

Adopting the TDD Mindset by Altering Habits

Previously, I wrote that test-driven development is a mindset, more than it is a skill. It's easy to learn but it's difficult to adopt because you have to change how you see and think about software development.

One way to modify your worldview is to form an habit and allow that habit to gradually transform your perspective. That's exactly how I made my transition to being a test-driven developer.