The Stupidly Simple Guide to Good Habits

You might want your yoga mat handy for this.

I can’t stress this enough — success doesn’t arrive overnight — it is a practice. The consistency is key: success comes from consistent effort.

Success is a habit.

In other words, your success is a direct result of your daily practice.

In these lessons are all the gold you ever need. Your daily practice can teach you and provide you with all the tools that you ever need for your substantial success.

The habit itself is actually the easy part — it’s mastering the commitment and deciding to do it that is the underlying challenge.

This Self-discipline is the number one tool for Success, and there are ways to make it easier to learn.

To change a habit, even a deeply ingrained habit of a lifetime, these 3 simple steps will help you fast track change.

Before we get started — you might want a baseline to look back on.

Let’s do that now:

How do you rate your will power?

On fire, or room for improvement?

Give yourself a score from 1–10:

— where 10 is on fire — you are a legitimate habits hero.

— Around the 5 mark is luke warm but not doing too badly

— 1 is ZERO will power at all.

Make a note of it somewhere safe. Keep a bullet journal collection for this, or if you’re doing it digitally, use the hashtag #dailypractice in your note.

So. You want to improve your will power score? You want habits for success?

If you are looking to up level and make lasting change, it has to happen at the habits level. Habits are what define our behaviour — and they account for up to 40% of our daily decision making (Duke University).

Habits are a result of your actions, and your actions are rooted in your words and your thoughts.

To really change your habits, you need to change your thoughts — and this is a commitment and a half.

If you’ve ever wondered why it’s so difficult to build a new habit, it’s probably because you haven’t tackled it at the mindset level, you’ve focused on trying to change the external action.

We need to go deeper than that.

As observed by Aristotle, “you are what you repeatedly do. Excellence is not an act, but a habit.”

So let’s look at how we can turn around your thinking to change your acts to form your habits for success.

This is how to get from ‘meh’ to excellent.

1. Focus on what you want, not what you don’t want

When I ask people what they want, they often give me a list of what they don’t want. For example —

Q: how do you want your day to look?

A: I don’t want to lie in anymore, I don’t want to be late all the time, I don’t want to be overweight.

The nugget here is that we get what we focus on. When you focus on the negative, you reaffirm it, and create more of it.

For your new habits to stick — think about what it is you really want.

As creatures of habit, we keep doing the same thing in and out. To break that cycle — it is easier to move towards something, than from something:

• wealth, rather than paying off debt
• health, rather than lose weight or stick to a diet
• happy home life, rather than spend less time at work / commuting
• being focused, rather than stop procrastinating

2. Create a Routine that sets you up for success

Once you know what you are working towards, you can create a routine that supports this goal. Whether it’s getting up earlier, reading and writing in the morning, journalling and checking in with your goals. Whatever rituals for success you choose, start small, and make them enjoyable so you are more likely to do them.

Set the alarm clock 30 minutes earlier.

Create a Power Hour — check in with your goals first thing in the morning. Do your exercise in this first hour.

This is how to get focus and bolster you against procrastination — and that will directly impact how the rest of your day goes (and, hint, the rest of your life).

3. Accountability, baby!

Habits tend to take about 90 days to bed in, and so the real challenge is to to just hang in there during this transition. Here’s your secret weapon…. Accountability.

Accountability isn’t a marketing ploy — it’s a real thing. Actors, athletes and CEOs have coaches for a reason — they want higher performance, and they know that getting support will get them there faster, less painfully, and with less pitfalls. Whether you work with a coach, a mastermind or accountability buddy, or you’ve just publicly declared to the world that you are working towards a goal and building new habits to support it — the extra accountability and support systems will jet propel you towards the results you desire.

Trust me, there’s nothing quite like getting a calendar reminder about your call with your mentor to set the fire under you to take action, and take evasive action not to slip back in to bad habits.

Accountability keeps you on track, impels you to take action, and reminds you why you’re doing this — it’s motivational gold dust.

Whether you have a mentor, a tracker in your diary, or a calendar reminder — stay accountable — it will keep you in the game of sticking to your new habits.

And that’s it!

Success is a few simple disciplines, practiced every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day.

— Jim Rohn

How to Build Habits for Success

Ready to beat procrastination, overcome overwhelm and transform your habits for success? There’s a tried and tested system.

To create your very own rituals for success — take a look over here.

Photo by Stefan Cosma on Unsplash