Daily Habits of Successful People
January is the month to stay resolute on resolutions. We have welcomed the new year with fresh resolutions that we don’t want to drop by mid-February. Aristotle is frequently quoted for “95% of everything you do is the result of habit”. The habits that we build help us accomplish our goals and resolutions. In a previous post, we highlighted a few phrases from Conor Neill who relies on 158 reflections or series of phrases to stay focused on what is important and to become “The Best Version of Yourself”. Author and motivational public speaker, Bryan Tracy, is known for his lectures about the importance of building strong habits through repetition to replace bad habits. His work on this subject is relevant in his 2009 book “Million Dollar Habits: 12 Power Practices to Double and Triple Your Income” which has been preceded by “Million Dollar Habits: Proven Power Practices to Double and Triple Your Income“.
Bryan argues that everything we do from the time we get up in the morning is habits and if we replace bad habits with good ones we put our wheels on the road to success. In his book “Million Dollar Habits” he highlights numerous habits among them is Daily goal setting, being result-oriented, being people-oriented, staying health-oriented, and staying honest.
But how hard it is to develop new habits through repetition? How long does it take? and what results can we get if a habit is easy to adopt compared to a hard-to-adopt habit? According to Bryan despite the fact that over time learning and adopting habits becomes easier and faster, there are seven steps you should undergo to adopt any given habit:
1- Make a Decision: follow through and commit to whatever decision or method you decide to follow to start to build the habit.
2- Never Allow an Exception: Clayton Christensen, a former Harvard Business School professor, had a powerful statement in this regard when it comes to firm decisions: “It’s easier to hold your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold them 98 percent of the time.”
3- Tell Others: when you are committed to others makes your responsibility more important and you become more attached and motivated in your pursuit to accomplish your habit.
4- Visualize Yourself: The identity trigger is one of the most important triggers to launch a new habit. If you visualize yourself as the “new you” with a new identity you have the first step of what it takes to build a new habit.
5- Create an Affirmation: that can help you to challenge and overcome self-sabotaging and negative thoughts. When you repeat it often, and believe in it, you can start to make positive change
6- Resolve to Persist: as you keep on practicing the new habit you reach a level where it becomes automatic and you feel uncomfortable if you don’t do it.
7- Reward Yourself: A step employed by Stanford Behavior Professor, BJ Fogg in his “Tiny Habits” framework. Motivation builds up by setting rewards. Ability increases when you create time to behavior, have enough money, many people around you can help you, increase your skills, acquire tools to help you do the job, and make behavior tiny. Prompts can be anything that reminds you to start a new behavior.