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Your Habits Are The Key To Your Success
Following on from my realisation of my high procrastination levels last week, I have taken another delve into a book by James Clear called “Atomic Habits”. I wanted to refresh my mind on productive vs unproductive habits and how they are formed.
What Are ‘Habits’?
A habit is an unconscious action your body does in response to a given trigger. It is controlled by your paradigm, which is a multitude of habits that basically make up your behaviour. It is good to note at this point that your habits do not define YOU as a being. They only define your behaviour. According to researchers at Duke University, they account for about 40 percent of our behaviours on any given day.Â
Your paradigm and habits define your day to day life and the decisions you make. They define how in or out of shape you are. How happy or unhappy you are. How successful or unsuccessful you are.
Why Is Knowing This Key To Your Success?
What you repeatedly do ultimately forms the person you are, the things you believe, and the personality that you portray. When you learn to transform your habits, you can transform your life.
Think about it, the decisions you make each day ultimately define the person you are. If you are someone who eats a lot of fatty or sugary foods then you are most likely quite out of shape. Your body shape will reflect this by being overweight. But eating fatty and sugary foods is a habit. You can change that habit and your body shape will also change.
Its the same for success. If you have a habit of spending hours scrolling social media, or binge watching TV, then you aren’t using your time to build a business. If you choose to spend that time watching videos about how to build a business, and then doing the actions, your business will start to grow.
Ways to Form A Better Habit
Any given behaviour occurs when you are triggered by something. It can be as simple as seeing a biscuit. Your body then wants the biscuit. You eat the biscuit. So the easiest way to build a new habit? Remove all biscuits from your house. Then there is no trigger!
But this doesn’t work outside your own home, and that’s where making a pre-decision comes in. Make a decision BEFORE you see a biscuit that you won’t eat it! The decision has already been made so when the time comes you will automatically say no to the biscuit.
James Clear’s strategy for building new habits follows a three step pattern:
- Reminder – the trigger that initiates the behaviour
- Routine – the behaviour / action you take (usually unconsciously)
- Reward – the benefit you gain from doing the behaviour
He says the easiest way to create a new habit is to focus on the reward. You need something you enjoy as a reward for doing a certain behaviour. For the biscuit example, you need a reward greater than the enjoyment of eating the biscuit in order to not eat it! This could be the simple pride of not eating it, or a physical reward you choose instead. When a reward worth having is available, then any behaviour can be changed.
Any new habit must be easy to do, obvious, and rewarding. You must be able to choose it when the trigger occurs, wherever you are!
Ways to Break Bad Habits
It is incredibly hard to just stop doing something that you do automatically. So don’t try! The key to changing a habit is not by stopping doing it. It is more effective to simply replace it with a new one. Consciously choosing to do something else instead will eventually replace the old habit.
James Clear suggests that the best way to break a bad habit is to remove the trigger from your environment. When you are not triggered by that thing it is impossible to then carry out the behaviour! As mentioned above, you can’t eat the biscuit if there are no biscuits to eat!
Environment is the biggest key to changing a habit. To help even further, you must have a replacement habit in place that you can choose to do instead. This habit must have the same level of reward or you won’t choose it!
How to Make a Habit Stick
When you start choosing another habit that is replacing a bad one, the easiest way to make it stick is to track it. If you can see a visual recording of how many times you have chosen the new habit, you will feel enthused to keep choosing it! Seeing your progress builds a feeling of pride and you can’t help but want to carry on.
Tracking can be as simple as ticking off each day on a calendar. Or putting something in a jar, like a marble or paperclip. Or having a grid where you colour in a square every time you choose your new habit.
Because of the resistance of your paradigm against change, any new habit will be hard to choose at first. But do not beat yourself up if you miss a day or eat a biscuit before you can choose not to! New habits can take 21 to 122 days to become unconscious. You just have to stay aware of your trigger and choose the new habit.
Atomic Habits
A lot of this information comes from James Clear’s book Atomic Habits. So I want to recommend it as it is the most comprehensive guide on how to change your habits and get 1% better every day.
Packed with evidence-based self-improvement strategies, Atomic Habits will teach you how to make the small changes that will transform your habits and deliver remarkable results.
James Clear also has a weekly newsletter that contains lots of helpful information and tips. I get it and it always has useful information that I can use!
An Example From My Life
I have always enjoyed my morning lie ins. I could quite happily stay in bed until 10/11am! But when I started delving into the world of personal development I realised that this is not a good use of my time.
So I started setting an alarm each morning to get up 5 minutes earlier than the day before.
Over the space of a few weeks, which I will admit were VERY hard! That snooze button…….. I managed to get up consistently at 05:15. Now I am even waking up naturally before my alarm goes off and feeling more awake through the day than before!
But how did I help myself build this habit? After the first few days I realised that the snooze button was in easy reach. So I moved my phone away from the bedside so I had to physically get out of bed to turn the alarm off. It is much easier to stay up if already out of bed!
I also started tracking each day I did and didn’t get up at the time I wanted. A simple cross or dot on the year planner page of my diary was enough. I am a stickler for ticking things off so that daily cross was a lot of motivation! I also noticed how I felt after a few days of my morning routine. Happier, calmer, motivated, enthusiastic, as opposed to tired and rundown.
A new morning routine also helped!
My Morning Routine
- Meditation
- Mini workout (press ups, sit ups, squats, some days a short yoga)
- Daily study video (as part of my Proctor Gallagher Training)
- Writing out my goal / reading my self-image statement
- Checking my plan for the day
After that it then depends on what time my little one gets up! But once the above are done I am in productive mode so I get on with my get done list until breakfast.
What do You Think?
It really can be as simple as that! But if you do want some help with it, or someone to hold you accountable, contact me today. I would love to help! If I can help others feel as fulfilled as I do when a new habit becomes unconscious, then I want in!
If this 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.
Speak to you soon!
Jaiye
