It would be great if we could just have any habit we want in a snap. However, we know that habits are formed overtime. It is during the “formative” time that we usually end up giving up because it is of course the time when we have to rely on motivation and self-discipline. As I have said before though, when the motivation wanes we end up having to work twice as hard to fight inertia. So what do we do while we don’t have our habits to fall back to yet? How do we prepare for the waning of motivation?
One of the best things we can do to make habit forming time easier and so increase our changes of success is to control what we can in our immediate environment while we still have the motivation to do it. Setting up your environment to help you succeed at your goal is definitely not only sensible but also the path to least resistance. For example, if losing weight is your goal and the habits you need to develop include exercise and a healthy diet the first things you need to do is get rid of all the junk food in the house and shop for healthier alternatives. If you have junk food all around you how can you expect to resist the temptation? As for exercise you can buy yourself a good pair of rubber shoes and dust off your exercise equipment. Make what you need accessible and what you don’t inaccessible.
Another thing that is pretty effective is to get some help. Join a group with the same goals as you or have an accountability partner. Make sure your partner is not an enabler or you’ll just end up making excuses for each other. Instead get someone you trust and respect who can help spur and motivate you when you cannot do it yourself. In the end though, it will still be up to you but setting yourself up to succeed instead of setting yourself up to fail sure will help a lot.
On my last post I discussed how having healthy habits will see us through to success during times when our motivation is at a low point. This time I will be discussing some healthy habits that we can form to help up succeed in the different aspects of our life.
Perhaps one of the most popular books ever written about habits is Stephen Covey’s “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”. There he elaborates on the 7 habits that he says effective people. According to Covey the 7 habits are:
1. Be proactive
2. Begin with the end in mind
3. Put first things first
4. Think Win/Win – teamwork
5. Seek first to understand – communication
6. Synergize – cooperation
7. Sharpening the saw – renewal or continued development of the 7 habits
As you see the first three deals with self-mastery (he calls it dependence to independence), which is something we all should strive for first. Without the first three it would be hard to follow through on all our tasks, which will of course affect our relations with other people as well as our jobs. Another thing you would notice is that Covey approaches the habits not with a list of tasks but with our mindset. I believe that we should develop specific tasks as our habit but he is very correct in putting emphasis on making sure that we have specific mindsets as a habit, after all our actions are determined by our thoughts. So to be able to develop habits like going to work on time or speaking more positively we need to develop the habit of choosing to be proactive, thinking of our end goals, knowing hoe to prioritize, and all the other things that Covey says we should develop.
