Welcome to reThink Your Perspective’s blog. Helping you to unlock your potential, empower your mindset, create productive habits, and boost your motivation.
You can listen to this blog as a Podcast HERE.
Do You Need Some New Habits?
As part of my coaching, I help people to create new habits. New habits are one of the essential parts of changing your life for the better! It is our past and current habits that have put us where we are today.
To get to somewhere new, to break free of the life we currently live, we must make changes. Starting with new habits.
How Do I Tell If My Habits Need Changing?
If you ever feel like you are watching yourself from outside your own body and disapproving of something you are doing, then you need to change that habit. You could be mindlessly scrolling social media when the little voice pops up and lists other things you should be doing at that moment. That is your conscious mind trying to give you a push towards something more productive!
If you have a goal you are working towards but not making any progress, you need new habits.
If your results are things you don’t want, and no matter what you do they aren’t changing. Then you need to shift your habits.
It is when you feel stuck, lost, off purpose, miserable, that you need to take a look at your habits and make some changes. Your current habits are caused by your paradigm which wants you to stay where you are. It doesn’t care whether you are happy or not consciously. It simply wants you to stay where you are as that is known and, in it’s opinion, safe.
How Can I Create New Habits?
Firstly, I will direct you to my previous blog post concerning how the mind works. That post and this video really emphasise how our mind works. The mind controls everything in our world. We use our mind to create thoughts, these create feelings, which put our body in a certain vibration, and cause us to perform certain actions. To make changes to our physical world and our actions, we must first make changes in our mind.
Once we understand that 95% of our behaviour is controlled by our subconscious paradigm, we can also understand that we can update our paradigm by making conscious decisions. Choosing another option than our usual automatic behaviour starts to create new automatic behaviours. And that is the great thing about our minds; we have the ability to choose!
We can choose either to accept or reject any idea or thought that pops into our mind. No one else can force you to think anything you don’t want to. You may think that is not the case, as that is how we have been conditioned, but you are the only person in control of your mind. You can choose to hear and then reject other people’s thoughts and ideas if they don’t resonate with you.
There is an amazing book called Atomic Habits by James Clear that sets out how to make changes to your habits. He also has a newsletter that goes out every Thursday and his website is full of useful information to help as well.
The book goes through lots of helpful tips and research to help you identify your non productive habits and turn them into productive ones.
What I Find Works For Me
I must point out that to make the habit shifts, the key underlying principle for success is having a big WHY. WHY do you want to change that habit? What are you working towards that that habit does not support? What is it that you REALLY want in your life? Your new habits must be set up with that thing in mind. What habits do you need to reach that goal?
Make sure you only work on one habit at a time though! Don’t overwhelm yourself by trying to change too much in one go.
For me, my WHY is time and financial freedom. As discussed in various other places, I have always felt there should be more to life than go to school, go to work, retire, die. With a bit of living thrown in there of course! When I found the world of Personal Development I found ideas to get me out of the prescribed way of living and off I went!
Humans are visual thinkers, we need an image to be able to work effectively. So I drew / painted the image I hold for my WHY. This is my Lake House. My dream house. I will share pictures of the real place once it is built. Because it will be built! This is what I am working towards every day. The reason I am changing my habits one at a time.
Humans are creatures of habit. And our will power alone cannot defeat our paradigm. It would be a constant uphill struggle! So to change our habits, we have to replace them with something else.
New Habit #1 – Getting Up Earlier
My biggest take away from the Atomic Habits book is to make new habits easy, convenient and rewarding. The old habits that we have are habits because they are easy, automatic and we get something from them. So to change them we need to replace them with something equally rewarding and easy. Otherwise, we will simply choose the old habit over the new one.
My first big habit I wanted to change was to get up earlier each morning to do my studying before getting my daughter up and ready for school and getting on with my own work for the day. Anyone that knows me knows that I love my bed! I am lucky in that my daughter loves hers to, so we’ve never had any early morning wake ups. My habit was to get up at the last possible moment everyday (hence short hair and lack of makeup!!), and that is what I wanted to change (not the makeup or hair bit though!).
I made my new habit as easy as possible by setting up my laptop and everything I needed for my morning study the night before. This means no faffing around or distractions in the morning. Its there and ready to go.
I am happy to report that I now naturally wake up every morning around 5:20am, bright eyed and bushy tailed! Yes it has taken a lot of persistence! But I have focussed on the reward of daily study and my goal and now have this habit working automatically. Do I still have days where I REALLY do not want to get up? Of course! But I just circle my mind back to my reason why and up I get!
New Habit #2 – Do Yoga Every Morning
Once I had my get up earlier habit secured, which took a good couple of months, the next habit I wanted to start was to do yoga / exercise every morning.
Again, I followed the steps in Atomic Habits and made the habit as easy as possible. In this case, laying out my yoga mat before I went to bed.
I also saved a few yoga videos in a YouTube playlist so I can just click on one and off I go rather than needing to hunt for one and getting distracted. I use Yoga With Adriene for my videos as she is really easy to follow, gives modifications, and has a good sense of humour.
This new habit started just over a month ago. And bar a couple of days, I have managed a 10-15minute yoga session before my morning study every day. Weekends included!
New Habit #3 – What Is Next On My List…
Now I feel I have these two big shifts done and working mostly automatically, it is time to choose my next new habits. Something that changes an unproductive habit to a productive one… That can be made easy and convenient, with a big reward…
Self-image.
“It is not who we are that holds us back, but who we think we are not!“
Various
I have struggled for years with how I see myself. It doesn’t matter where it came from, I can’t change it so don’t dwell on it. But now I am having success with changing some pretty big habits in other parts of my life, I think it is time to focus on the one that really holds me back. It is the one thing that really holds most people back!
I have written a self-image statement, and I read it every day. I’ll admit to usually forgetting it at first! So step one, have the statement open and ready in front of my computer each night so I can read it as soon as I sit down for morning study.
Easy and convenient, check!
Now for the reward. If I improve my self-image, I will feel better about me. About who Jaiye is. This then allows me to be my best self for other people instead of feeling insecure or hiding parts of me.
Consciously, I love who I am becoming! Now I need to reinforce that so that I believe it subconsciously. Shift the paradigm from its current negative view to the view of the person I am becoming.
What Will Your New Habits Be?
I hope this blog post has inspired you to make changes to your own habits!
To make it easier for you, I have created a self study course with a daily journal entitled “Planituding” which helps you to decide on, set up and follow through with new habits as one part of a new approach to each day.
There is no charge for the electronic copy (just drop me a message!), but if you want a printed hardcopy then these are available to buy from this website with laminated or unlaminated covers, as A4 and A5 and with wire binding. I have also recorded an unboxing video if you want to see the journals in their full printed glory.
What Do You Think?
If this resonates with you and you want to discuss it further, then get in touch today. Either here or through any of my social medias or schedule a call to discuss it with me directly.
I love hearing from my readers and finding more ways to help them individually! I look forward to speaking with you soon and hope this post helps you to start living to your fullest potential.
Have a great rest of your day!
Jaiye
