Imagine a life where you have a habit of completing projects, eating well, keeping in touch with family and friends, and working to your fullest potential.
When you have a foundation of good habits, you’re setting yourself up for a full, healthy, and successful life.
Here are 5 steps to changing your habits that can in turn, change your entire life.
1. Identify your Keystone Habit, and focus on it.
The habit you identify as the most important thing you can change about your life. To find out what that is for you, ask yourself, what constantly gnaws at you? Is it something you do that you want to stop, or something you don’t do and want to start?
Whichever habit you’re working on, pick one at a time.
More than one at a time will be overwhelming and will increase your likelihood of failing to improve any habits.
2. Identify your current routine and the reward you get from it.
Let’s say you want to build a habit of getting to the office a half hour early each day. You want to do this because you think the extra quiet time in the morning will help you to be more productive, and that productivity will be rewarded by an increased sense of job satisfaction, and an overall better work environment.
Currently, you get to the office just on time. Your current routine is to leave your house in a rush, at the exact time you’ve calculated that (without traffic or incident) will get you to work on time. Your reward is spending some extra time at your house in the morning, spending an extra half hour sleeping or “charging your batteries” for the day ahead.
3. Consider the challenges.
Challenges are often cues that push you to fall back into old habits. In the example of getting to work earlier, your challenges may lie in your sleep patterns the night before, or in coordinating schedules with a partner. These challenges will not magically disappear so you need to take them into account.
But don’t let the presence of challenges, or worry that new challenges will come up in the future, deter you from establishing your new habits. If your challenges include coordinating with other people, make them a part of your new routine, as I’ll explain later. Right now, simply identify what the challenges or obstacles are.
4. Plan your new routine and pinpoint the reward.
Old habits never disappear; they are simply replaced with new habits. In the example of getting to the office earlier, the new routine involves leaving the house a half hour earlier.
If the old habit was rewarded with the thought that you’ll have more energy for the day by staying in your house longer, the new habit needs to focus around the idea that more rest doesn’t necessarily mean more energy. In other words, you’ll want to address what you think you’ll be giving up by replacing the old habit.
5. Power through setbacks.
Sometimes, it’s not just willpower that runs out. Sometimes we are swayed from our paths by life “getting in the way” of new goals. If something sways you from your challenge, the best course of action is to evaluate the situation and see how you can get around, over, or through that obstacle.
However, once a new habit is established, it actually becomes our default setting. If your usual habits are healthy, then stressful times are less likely to throw you off from your usual routines. In other words, we’re just as likely to default to healthy habits as we are to self-sabotaging habits, if those healthy habits have become a part of our everyday routine.
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