Welcome to reThink Your Perspective’s blog. Helping you to unlock your potential, empower your mindset, create productive habits, and boost your motivation.
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What are Habits?
We all have good habits. Productive actions that we do every day. But we also all have bad habits. Actions that do not serve us or our journey to the life we want to be living.
Humans are habitual creatures, and our habits are controlled by our subconscious mind. This means that we do our habits, both productive and non-productive, automatically. Without thinking about them.
However, we have a conscious mind as well that we can employ to update our habits consciously. This is quite simple to do, but first let us discuss what the pros and cons of each habit type is.
What Is A Bad Habit?
I’ve always felt that calling something a bad habit puts a negative connotation on it. So I suggest that we change “bad habit” to “Non Productive Action”. This allows us to see the habit in a different way, less negatively, which draws a smaller negative emotional response.
We all do non-productive actions every day. Binge watching Netflix. Scrolling social media. Procrastinating with things. Pressing snooze on the alarm. Going to bed late. Smoking. Having that extra biscuit… But what we need to realise is that these are set and controlled by our paradigms. They are habits that we have developed over time and have become automatic. We don’t even notice when we do them.
Our habits, both productive and non-productive, keep us where we are. Safe and comfortable. In our paradigm’s opinion. Our paradigm pays no heed to what we consciously want. It has its routines that it has learnt over days, months or years and it will automatically complete them. Unless you choose to do something differently.
How Do We Notice Our Non-Productive Actions?
The first step to becoming aware of your non-productive actions is to set a goal. To make changes to any of our habits we need a why, or why would we want to make changes?
Once we have a goal set, we will know what habits we need to develop in order to get to it. Each goal will need its own skills and habits.
For example, to start your own business you are going to need to learn how to set a budget. Write a business plan. Or change your routine around so you have time each day to work on your business. This will require setting time to study, attend some training, working instead of watching TV.
In contrast, setting a goal of climbing Everest will require new habits around fitness. You’ll need to set a fitness routine and follow it. Study about how to climb a mountain. Learn about weather patterns and the equipment you will need.
Whatever the goal is that you set, you will need to swop some non-productive habits for productive actions. If you didn’t have to change your habits, you would have already achieved your goal!
Once Noticed, How Do We Upgrade Our Habits?
This is the topic for another blog post, but I will say that it is not as simple as just noticing and stopping the habit. To just stop will create a vacuum and if you do not consciously fill it with something else (i.e. a productive habit), your paradigm will fill it in with something it chooses. Which will probably be non-productive! 5 Tips To Change Your Habits is a great place to start upgrading your habits rather than simply stopping them!
To upgrade your non-productive actions, you have to be aware of them. Be consciously aware of everything you do each day and make a list of the habits you want to upgrade. Then for each one you need to think of something to do instead that is productive and will get you to your goal.
What Are We Upgrading To?
Our non-productive actions are things that do not serve us. So productive actions are the opposite. They are habits you perform that get you closer to the goal you are working towards.
They may not always be things that you want to do, but they are productive all the same! It is usual that the things we want to do, that are ingrained in us as entertainment and gives us the little boosts of happy chemicals (watching TV, scrolling social media, eating junk food etc), are things that make us unproductive. That sap our time, but give us a little boost.
But once you have a goal to work towards, or the realisation that there should be more to life, these habits create frustration in us. We consider them as wasting our time and beat ourselves up for allowing the time to slip away when we could be doing something more productive. This is when you must start to develop productive habits / actions to do instead. That give you the same reward as watching TV or whatever the bad habit was!
Productive actions can include:
- A daily routine of activities that must be done. For an ecommerce business this could be checking stock levels, researching new products, adding new products, advertising products.
- Putting things away when you have finished using them
- Writing get done lists and then working through them one at a time
- Daily exercise
- Having things to do when you notice you are procrastinating (e.g. 10 minute tasks).
Productive actions are what will bring our goals to fruition. They are the daily activities that are not necessarily what you want to be doing, but if not done will mean you missing your deadlines.
As Albert E. N. Gray said,
“Successful people are those who formed the habit of doing things that failures don’t like to do”.
They don’t like doing them either! But they have made them into habits, so they are performed subconsciously and efficiently and are then out of the way!
How Do You Develop Productive Habits / Actions?
As with trying to change non-productive habits, to develop productive habits you must first decide on a goal. Choose the thing that you are working towards in order to work out what habits you need to get there.
To get better grades in school or on a course, you need to develop better study habits. To beat your best running time over 5km you need more consistent training habits. Want to start a business? You need to create habits that replace your evening TV schedule.
Every goal will require a different set of productive habits to get there. Be it getting up earlier, going to bed earlier, eating healthier, stopping smoking, or any other habit, you require a strong why to be able to follow through with your decision.
Finding your why and setting a goal will be and have been covered in other blog posts. Use the search bar and search “Goal” to find them!
What Do You Think?
If this blog resonates with you then please share your thoughts below or get in touch today. Either here or through any of my social medias or schedule a call to discuss it with me directly.
I look forward to hearing from you!
To your success.
Jaiye
