“Motivation is what gets you fired up and moving, but your daily habits are what catapult you to success long after the motivation is gone!” — John Rowley
Every year diligent people sit down and define his or her goals for the coming year, and with good reason. Setting goals work! But in order to achieve goals you must have empowering habits to support your desired outcome. You become what you do all the time. We all have habits, some good and some bad. We get up on the same side of the bed, dress ourselves, and brush our teeth the same way every day. If you have empowering habits, you will be more successful in life. If you have habits that limit you, you can replace them with habits that support your goals- – and you will watch your life transform before your eyes.
What Do Your Current Habits Look Like?
Are your habits helping you to be the person you want to be or are they having the opposite effect? Are your habits well thought out or are they ones that just developed over time and you’re really not sure why you even have them? Now we are going to get into a little more detail on how to develop new empowering habits.
How to develop new and empowering habits:
Benjamin Franklin once said, “Many people die at twenty five and aren’t buried until they are seventy five.” These are the same people who just let life happen to them. They develop habits as time goes by and become a slave to habits that don’t support them. Developing new habits requires effort and takes time. The rule of thumb is that it takes 21 days to develop a new habit.
This is probably true for small habits but large lifestyle changes take a little more time.
The best way to eliminate or break a bad habit is by replacing it with something else. The bad habit is serving a purpose in your life. When you eliminate the bad habit you are creating a void, which needs to be filled by something else, or the bad habit will simply creep back into your life. If you overeat to relieve stress, you need to find a more productive way to relax, such as going for a walk or going to the gym.
Imagine if you exchanged two limiting habits for two empowering habits every year. In five years, that would be ten empowering habits that you do without effort. That is with only two a year. What if you did six a year? In five years, you would have 30 empowering habits. Do you think your life would be different with thirty empowering habits? All your successes will pile up on top of each other and you will have an extraordinary quality of life by making these small daily changes.
In order to change your habits:
1. You must define them so write down all the habits that limit you.
2. Define your new successful habits in detail. Write down what new habit you will do in place of your old, limiting habits.
3. Develop an action plan for this new habit. This may be as simple as scheduling time to exercise, read your bible, prospect or return calls.
4. Keep it as simple as possible. Make it easy to be successful in all areas of your life.