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Good habits are the key to all success. Bad habits are unlocked door to failure
-Og Mandino
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WHEN YOU WANT TO ACHIEVE A GOAL IMPORTANT to you, it is essential you change some of your current habits with new ones, whether for personal use, such as losing weight, getting in shape, improving your situation, finances, or for a professional purpose, such as starting a business, getting a promotion, increasing your clientele.
Abandoning certain reflexes and acquiring others is a huge challenge for the human being, and we often underestimate the amount of effort needed to reach our goals. But if we succeed in changing some bad habits for us by better ones, our chances of realizing our dreams and our goals will be very strong.
To change your habits, it is important to understand how they are created. The starting point for creating a habit, reflex or addiction is a new action you are doing that generates at home:
If you repeat this same action regularly, after a while, it will become a habit. In short, what is at the base of this habit is your perception of what will bring you pleasure (usually in the short term) and lessen your suffering. The more time passes, the more this habit will be anchored in you.
Could a habit desirable in the past become undesirable today? Absolutely, because there are no good or bad habits, it always depends on what you want and your goals. How then to transform a habit you no longer want? You must change the emotional perceptions that your habit gives you. Your inner voice told you for years that this habit has brought you some happiness, but it tells you today that this is no longer the case: you must change your programming in your brain.
Reprogramming thoughts about what's good or bad for you is difficult, so here's a four-step approach that will definitely help you succeed in this changing of habit:
Step 1: What are your goals in the short, medium and long term? The first task is to identify the goals you really care about and want to achieve. It's your goals that will determine whether a habit is good or bad for you.
Step 2: Why should you achieve this goal? This step is the most important because the answers will become your motivation. The more your "why" are strong and intense, the greater your chances of success. Occasionally, only one "why" suffices. I give you an example. Suppose you smoke and your goal is to stop. During your last visit to your doctor, he told you, "If you do not stop smoking immediately, you will die in six months". Faced with such an ultimatum, it is obvious that only one "why" will provoke in you a shock powerful enough to cause you to radically change your perception and your habit. When you hear bad news such as health problems, layoff, divorce, bankruptcy, etc. it's the best time to change your perceptions and take advantage of this distressing situation. An emotional shock is usually an opportunity that predisposes you to make a change.
If no unfortunate event occurs, you will have to act differently. Write a list of answers to the question why I need to change. The longer this list is, and the stronger the reasons, the better your chances of succeeding. Think about the benefits you'll get by giving up an old reflex with one that is more beneficial to you, not only in the short term, but also in the long term. Find 10, 20 or 30, even if it takes a few weeks of your time to identify them. At the end of this exercise, it should be clearly defined that the new habit should give you much more pleasure or greatly diminish your suffering.
Step 3: What is your action plan? What should you do to achieve your goal? Is it less eating? To exercise? To follow this or that course? Etc. Make sure you are very specific in your action plan. This step is the easiest to establish, but if you do not know how to do it, have a mentor or coach help you, read about it, and so on.
Step 4: Monitoring, rigor and measurement of results. To find out if you are progressing toward your goal in adopting the new habit, you need benchmarks to measure where you are. When you feel that you have progressed and your efforts are starting to work, it motivates you to maintain the direction.
Sounds easy, does not it? Well, think again because it's not. Changing your mental programming about your perceptions and habits is very difficult to perform. If you're not ready, then wait for the best time, but do not make the mistake of falling asleep for a long time doing nothing to change. This inaction will eventually come to haunt you.
If you do not succeed the first time, repeat using the same four step approach, but go deeper. Whatever your strengths, your weaknesses, your qualities, your faults, you, as a human being, always have the freedom to take charge of yourself, to never give up and to triumph and not to be a victim. The path of life is long, but it is also enjoyable, especially if you make the decision to get closer to your goal a little more each day by changing your habits.