Build on Your Good Habits and Eliminate the Bad Ones
If you’re like most people, you have a mixed bag of habits. Some are good, some are bad. But the key to success in your personal and professional life is found in learning how to boost your good habits and let go of the bad ones.
The Process of Identifying Your Patterns of Habit
You can have habits that are so deeply ingrained that you’re not consciously aware that you’re even doing them. These habits can sabotage your success goals. There are several common areas where people want to succeed but have habits that are holding them back.
The areas where most people want to find success are financial, material, physical and emotional. These areas are further broken down in to sub-areas such as happiness, good self-esteem, joy, peace, needing more money or unhappiness with the way the money is earned such as a job they hate, travel, weight loss, career change, romantic relationships, home ownership and the future.
Some of the bad habits associated with the four main areas where people want to find success are found under financial and those are: poor money management skills, impulse buying or an out of balance budget.
Under material bad habits, it can be things like looking at the short term versus long term such as having possessions that drain you, putting too much demand on your time and money rather than enhancing your life.
Physically, it can be the desire to lose weight and get fit yet allowing bad habits such as eating fast food and blowing off exercise to be part of your daily or weekly lifestyle. Emotionally, it can be having a bad relationship or wanting a relationship but not taking steps to put yourself out there.
Whatever area of life where you want to find success in, you must identify what habits you have that are acting like weights and holding you back. You have to look at the moments of success, too.
Look at the things you did that helped you move forward. For example, if weight loss was one goal and you used to bring a healthy lunch to the office but you stopped and starting gaining weight, identify how that lunch habit affected your level of success.
If you’re someone who always seems to be out of time to do all the things that you want to do or need to do to find success, then you need to find a way to track your time. There are many different tracking apps that you can download for this.
By managing your time, you’ll stop wasting it on things that don’t help you to succeed. What you need to do first is look at where you want to be. Then look at the good habits that you have or need to develop for that goal.
Once you do that, take an honest look at yourself and find the bad habits that you know are holding you back or will hold you back. Work on stopping those habits from impeding your forward motion.
For example, if your goal is to lose weight and you know you have a problem with junk food, don’t keep any in the house.
Stop Procrastinating and Wasting Time If You Want to Find Success
Most people want find success but they engage in self-defeating habits like procrastinating and wasting time which can slow or even stop them from reaching their goals.
There are valid reasons that people procrastinate. Some procrastinate because they simply don’t have a desire to do whatever task or take whatever step it is that will move them closer to success.
What they don’t realize is that not having a desire, which is really just a lack of motivation, is a common thread even among the world’s most successful people. So why then have successful people managed to push through?
It’s because the key to finding success is found in switching the place that motivation has in your life. When you stop procrastinating and get busy taking action, then the motivation comes.
You’ll suddenly look forward to the next step and the one after that. It’s that forward motion – that step that you take – that leads you where you want to be and in the process, the feeling and the desire will come along with it.
You have to ask yourself what the next step is that you need to take at the moment. If it’s starting your own business and you need a marketing plan, then get started working on that.
Sometimes you do have a desire to move forward but you don’t feel like you have the skills or knowledge so then you procrastinate because you don’t feel like you have a good grasp on knowing what you should do.
That’s fixed by learning. You just find the answers to your problem. You ask a mentor. You look it up online. You find a resource or whatever it takes to gain the understanding to keep moving forward.
Being afraid that they’re going to flop is one reason that some people procrastinate. Perfectionism can be one of the root causes of procrastination. People fear failing because they think that they’ll end up derailing their success.
They want to keep from feeling bad about themselves and sometimes think that it’s better to not attempt something than to attempt it and be bad at it. But you have to remember that the road to success really is paved with moments of falling down.
The end of the journey simply shows that you are someone who continued to get back up despite the obstacles you faced. Strangely enough, the fear of success often goes hand in hand with the fear of failure.
You may have had success in the past and you feel that you’ve peaked. That whatever you accomplish now can’t possibly be any better than what you’ve already done. To end procrastination and wasting time, have a daily list of the things you need to get done or the steps that you need to take to get to success.
Write it out the night before and as soon as you’re ready to get started, you’ll have a map in front of you showing you what that first step needs to be.
Develop the Right Mindset and Do Away with Negative Thinking
Achieving success depends on you having the right mindset. If you allow negative thinking to run rampant in your mind, it can cause you to doubt yourself and your life’s direction.
It can also cause you to feed into wrong beliefs. Most negative thoughts are on a repeat cycle that play in the back of your mind and it can reach a point where you’re not even aware that you’re thinking negatively.
Negative thoughts operate under the guise of misinformation. The first step in developing the right mindset is found in learning to identify what your negative thoughts are.
People rarely ever have a single negative thought. That’s because negativity always breeds negativity. And these thoughts always impact your productivity. When you have the wrong mindset and you give way to negative thinking, you’ll set the stage for letting thoughts that impact your emotions take over.
For example, if you allow the thinking that you can’t do something because you’re not good enough or you think you’re a failure, you’ll begin to feel like you can’t do it and you’ll feel like a failure.
You’ll start to tell yourself that and you’ll lose the desire to go after whatever your goals are. When you understand what negative thoughts are, you can stop them the second that they appear.
Negative thoughts almost always cause you to fret about something. They can cause you to get knots in your stomach and to lose sleep. They can cause you to stop all forward motion and you’ll get stuck.
The thing about negative thoughts is that there’s usually absolutely no truth to them. Negative thinking always colors the perception of a situation as being worse than it actually is or will be.
With negative thinking, you might think that everything is going to go wrong even though it hasn’t. One way to identify negative thinking is when you have doom and gloom thought processes about the future in regards to your goals.
When you stop negative thinking, it allows room for the right mindset to develop. You’ll be able to know when a negative thought is in action because you’ll see the underlying critical words you think.
Negative thinking likes to look for the bad in you and in what you do. It takes all your accomplishments and everything that you want to achieve and rips it apart. Negative thoughts never uplift, and they never praise.
Once you develop the right mindset, you’ll be able to stop allowing thoughts that aren’t kind or loving toward yourself. You’ll be able to stop your thoughts from always shining a mind spotlight on the things that went wrong and you’ll be able to see all the things that have gone right.
You won’t see what you can’t do. You’ll see what you can do. To end negative thoughts, you must correct the misinformation. Listen to what you’re thinking and alter the course of the thought.
For example, a negative thought would be I can’t do anything right. You can take control of that thought by stopping and correcting it. You can tell yourself that it’s not true and then point out all the things that you have done correctly.
Develop a Love of the Pursuit of Learning
To be successful in any endeavor, you’ll have things that you’ll need to learn. While that’s okay with some people because they love learning, love getting life lessons, other people dread the idea of learning.
Whether you like it or hate it, whatever goals you set for yourself, you’re going to have to gain knowledge or possibly learn skills that you need to have in order to succeed. Learning is something that helps you to develop good habits and leave behind the bad ones.
For example, you might have the habit of doing something a certain way because you haven’t learned any other way to do that task. But then you do learn a new way and discover that it not only saves you time, but that the new way is easier, too.
When you have a love of learning, it allows you to level up the knowledge that you already have. You might know a little about something like starting a business but learning will help you to know how to do all the areas involved in becoming an entrepreneur.
By developing a love for the pursuit of learning, you’ll be able to better understand the journey you’re on in life as well as your goal. You’ll gain more wisdom and discover how you can improve on the goals you want to accomplish.
Not only can the love of wanting to learn help you accomplish what you set your mind to but it can also impact your attitude. The more that you learn about yourself and the success that you see, the more it will change how you feel about it.
So if you’re someone who’s struggled with negative thoughts, what you learn can help you with the development of the right mindset. You’ll learn how you can have a positive attitude no matter what crops up on your life.
The love of learning will spur you to take action because it gives you the inner strength to understand that you’re someone who’s capable. It fuels your imagination and empowers you to have the best version of yourself.
In addition to fueling your imagination and empowering you, learning to love the pursuit of learning broadens your mind and gives you advantages that you may not have had without what you’ve learned.
It changes you as a person because it elevates your sense of self-worth. Gives you a confidence that will help you reach for your dreams. Loving learning can teach you to be more flexible and it can teach you that it’s okay to take risks and encounter setbacks.
Approach Success as a Whole Life Concept
Your journey to success isn’t all you. It’s only a part of who you are and what you want. That’s why you need to look at success the right way. The right way to approach success is by looking at it as a whole life concept.
Success first begins with your inner passion. This is whatever fuels you to reach for your goals. What you’re passionate about will be at the center and will radiate outward. It’s what will drive you to keep on going when obstacles appear.
From your passion, you’ll gain the wisdom that you need to be able to put that passion into active steps. You’ll use what you’re passionate about and what you’ve learned, and you’ll apply that toward success.
That application will radiate from your life into the lives of others and it all starts with your passion. The whole life concept is one that focuses on the journey that you’re taking toward success and it puts the reaching of your success and how you reach it on your shoulders.
It’s all the decisions that you make that aren’t related to that particular goal as well. You have to look at how your success and your striving toward that is going to impact other areas of your life such as your health.
You have to consider how it’s going to affect your relationships. You can’t allow moving toward success to cost you the things and the people who are equally as important to you as achieving your dream.
That’s why a whole life concept is a balanced concept. It allows you to develop a path to success that keeps what’s important to you in mind. The path that you take to success is often paved by the decisions that you make that aren’t related to that success.
Looking at success must be kept in the proper perspective. Your success will never come without considering the whole person of you. You have to take into consideration what it is that you want for your career.
You have to look at what the journey to success will do to what your personal relationships need from you. This might be things such as your time or financial support. When you approach success with a whole life mindset it can also help you to retain success because you know what’s important for you as well as those your success impacts.
