Habits – Helpers and Hinderers. What are yours doing for you?

We are what we repeatedly do!!

Psychologists have shown that on a daily basis up to 90% of everything we do is habitual. Think about the first hour of your day as a perfect example. The way you get out of bed, the order that you shower, get dressed, eat breakfast, clean your teeth, the route you take to work etc. I imagine it is done almost exactly the same way every single day, I know mine definitely is. Another great example is the way people do their groceries. If you are someone who does a big shop each week or fortnight, I would put a large wager that you walk the same direction through the store, and go down the same isles in the same order each visit. Even the thought of walking the opposite direction can cause a weird, uncomfortable feeling.

Habits such as these are extremely beneficial in making our day to day lives simpler. They allow us to work on a certain level of auto-pilot and not have to think about every single action we take. This allows us to use our brain power to think about other things, make plans, have conversations etc.

The down side to our habitual nature is that those unconscious routines can be self-sabotaging and inhibiting to our ability for success.

Success is indiscriminate – good or bad habits will deliver the equivalent outcomes.

Wherever you are right now is a result of your previously established habits. These may be things like always running late, staying up too late watching tv, smoking, eating unnecessary sweets after dinner, drinking beer/wine after work each day, skipping breakfast, eating your kids leftovers, falling asleep on the lounge, drinking several lattes or cappuccinos daily etc. etc. The list goes on indefinitely, varying from person to person.

Whatever your own personal bad habits, think about the positive effect of changing to the opposite

• always being 10 minutes early
• turning off the tv and going to bed at a set time every night to get your 7-8 hours
• drinking chamomile tea after dinner
• not smoking – surely that makes sense
• replacing the beer/wine with water
• eating a healthy breakfast with protein every morning or having a breakfast shake
• measuring your own portions and not eating food that wasn’t on your plate
• making sure you get to bed for your bedtime and not having disturbed, uncomfortable sleep on the lounge
• drinking long blacks, espressos or green tea

The trouble with habits is that the positive and negative effects of these changes are generally not immediate. They grow consistently and compound over time. No one ever became overweight from eating cookies on 1 night, but putting your hand in the cookie jar every night for a year and you’ve got issues. The same is true with training, doing 1 session or missing 1 session won’t affect your body greatly, but training consistently for a year or not training at all for a year and you have amazingly different results.

What is the best way to eat an elephant? …………………………… One bite at a time!!

Success does not require massive changes to every part of your life. It takes dedicated focus on changing small, harmful habits you have developed over the years. You shouldn’t try to focus on changing all of your habits at once, in fact I always recommend only focusing on one thing at a time. Doing this will stop you from feeling overwhelmed by the full upheaval of everything you know as normal, and allow you to give each habit the focus it requires to change it. Trying to change too many things at once is setting yourself up for failure.

What type of person could you be in 5 years if you were to focus on changing one habit every 3 months? 

Imagine yourself 5 years from now if you stick to the HABIT of altering one negative pattern you’ve developed, every 3 months for the duration of that time. In this time you will have built 20 new life-changing routines, and your health, productivity, efficiency, and overall well-being will be radically enhanced.

Why 3 months? Research has shown that if you repeat an act or behaviour for 13 weeks, it will then be with you for life. You would then have to make a conscious decision to change it again. 3 months and you will have established your new, life improving, constructive habit!! 

So how do you change these habits?

The first step is to identify all of your personal habits which are holding you back from being the person you want to be. Make a list of all the things you do day in and day out that don’t serve your ideal future self. If you need help making this list, then ask those closest to you, but endeavour to not get defensive if they bring up things you are unaware of. Don’t challenge them, thank them, as they are only trying to help and you asked them for it.

Once you have made your list, you then need to decide on a new, supportive habit that you can develop to replace the old, damaging one. Go through each of your bad habits on the list and write down the new habit you will create next to it.

Now it’s time to take action.

Out of your list you should choose one habit and dedicate the next 3 months to replacing the bad habit, with a new positive one. When you are first starting out with this, I recommend choosing one of the easier habits on your list for the first 1 or 2. What this will do is prove to you that it is possible for you to change, and help create a HABIT of success. We all get a massive boost in self-esteem whenever we achieve a personal goal we have set. This increased self-esteem improves our chances for success on the more daunting challenges on the list.

For example if you have on your list:

1. Start eating breakfast
2. Quit smoking
3. Going to bed at 930pm every night

I would recommend tackling one (or both) of the smaller, seemingly easier ones first. Although health wise, the most important of these would be to give up smoking, developing a HABIT of success by achieving #1 and #3 first will re-inforce what you are capable of. Once you prove to yourself you can handle the changes, then you attack all of the biggest and scariest ones on your list, ONE AT A TIME.

100% is the only commitment that matters.

The final thing you need to break old habits is a steadfast, unwavering commitment to succeed. Anything less than 100% commitment and you are kidding yourself. If you decide that no matter what happens, you will stick to your plan then it takes away any of the grey area. We as humans are great at creating stories to justify why we can’t start or finish things. But in the end stories are all they are. If you want to change something badly enough then you can, if you don’t then you won’t.