The Power of Habits

Motivation is what gets you fired up and moving but your daily habits are what catapult you to success long after the motivation is gone! — John Rowley

With the start of a new year everyone is setting goals and with good reason, goals work!  But in order to achieve your goals you must have empowering habits.  You become what you do all the time.  We all have habits, some good, and some bad.  We get up on the same side of the bed, dress ourselves and brush our teeth the same way every day.  If you have empowering habits, you will be more successful in life.   If you have habits that limit you, replace them with habits that support your goals.

Are Your Habits Helpful or Hurtful?
It is up to you.  Develop your helpful habits now so they can kick in when you encounter Gravity.  Gravity is automatic and it’s everywhere. You don’t need to try much for gravity to take over.  You want to fall on your face, gravity is there to help. Do you want to climb to the heights of success, face overcoming odds and succeed time and time again?  Become the best in your area of expertise?  You don’t have to look to hard to find gravity, it is pulling at you as you try to succeed.  People help gravity by telling you things like, “You can’t do that. That won’t work. Why bother?” Your habits are your anti-gravity suite in life.  They pull you up to success.

It takes effort to be successful and to fight against the natural tendency of gravity which is, of course, to pull you down to the ground.  It is nothing personal. Gravity doesn’t get mad.  It just does its job.  Your job is to fight gravity and any of the tools it uses to keep you down.  You are in control of your destiny. You can succeed if you want to. In fact, the more you fight gravity the stronger you get and the less effect gravity will have on you.  You can become the person you know you should be!  It is up to you to develop the habits necessary for your success in all areas of your life.

How to develop new and empowering habits:
Developing new habits takes time.  The rule of thumb is that it takes 21 days to develop a new habit.  This is probably true for small habits but for large lifestyle changes, I think it will take longer.

Imagine if you exchanged 2 limiting habits for 2 empowering habits every year.  In five years, that would be 10 empowering habits that you do without effort.    That is with only 2 a year.  What if you did 6 a year?  In five years, you would have thirty empowering habits.  Do you think your life would be different with 30 empowering habits?  All your success will pile up on top of each other and you will have an extraordinary quality of life by making these small daily changes.

In order to change your habits:

• You must define them so write down all the habits that limit you.

• Define your new successful habit in detail.  Write down what you will do in place of your old, limiting habits.

• Develop an action plan for this new habit.

• This may be as simple as scheduling time to exercise, prospect or return calls.  Keep it as simple as possible.  Make it easy to be successful in all areas of your life.

Master your habits or they WILL master you!