Be A Master Of The Habits In Your Life

Wouldn’t it be nice to have everything run on autopilot? Eating healthy, exercise, and getting your work done just happening automatically. Unless they manage to invent robot servants, all your work isn’t going to disappear overnight. But if you program behaviors as new habits you can take out the struggle.

With a small amount of initial discipline, you can create a new habit that requires little effort to maintain. Here are some tips for creating new habits and making them stick:

1. Make it Daily

Consistency is critical if you want to make a habit stick. If you want to start exercising, go to the gym every day for your first thirty days. Going a couple times a week will make it harder to form the habit. Activities you do once every few days are trickier to lock in as habits.

2. Start Simple

Don’t try to completely change your life in one day. It is easy to get over-motivated and take on too much. If you wanted to play guitar two hours a day, first make the habit to go for thirty minutes and build on that.

3. Remind Yourself

Around two weeks into your commitment it can be easy to forget. Place reminders to execute your habit each day or you might miss a few days.

4. Form a Trigger

A trigger is a ritual you use right before executing your habit. If you wanted to wake up earlier, this could mean waking up in exactly the same way each morning. If you wanted to quit smoking you could practice snapping your fingers each time you felt the urge to pick up a cigarette.

5. Swish – A technique from NLP

Visualization is power! Visualize yourself performing the bad habit. Next visualize yourself pushing aside the bad habit and performing a better one. Finally, end that meditation with an image of yourself in a highly positive state. See yourself picking up the cigarette, see yourself putting it down and snapping your fingers, finally visualize yourself running and breathing free. Do it a few times until you automatically go through the pattern before executing the old habit.

6. Write it Down

A piece of paper with a resolution on it isn’t that important. Writing that resolution is. Writing makes your ideas more clear and focuses you on your end result.

7. Know the Benefits

Familiarize yourself with the benefits of making a change. Get books that show the benefits of regular exercise. Notice any changes in energy levels after you take on a new diet. Imagine getting better grades after improving your study habits.

8. Know the Pain

You should also be aware of the consequences. Exposing yourself to realistic information about the downsides of not making a change will give you added motivation.

9. Do it For Yourself

Don’t worry about all the things you “should” have as habits. Instead tool your habits towards your goals and imagine the things that motivate you. Weak guilt and empty resolutions aren’t enough to help you to make it all real.

Find your motivation and make it happen! :)