How to break bad habits

Did you know your daily habits have effectively set you up either for success or for failure, before you’ve even got out of bed in the morning?

That’s because the things you do routinely, perhaps even automatically, are either helping you or hindering you – day in and day out.

Let me first ask you – how many of your habits do you consciously notice? Don’t worry, that’s really a rhetorical question because the simple truth is – we don’t really notice our habits. The very nature of habits is that we do them automatically and without thinking.

That’s also why habits can prove to be the silent killers in your business…eating your time, wasting your money, sapping your energy, and holding you back. And without you even really noticing them.

The thing is, your brains like to automate processes as much as it can. That’s a good thing really – because the more it automates the little things, the more capacity it frees up to keep you safe and thinking about the bigger things.

The flipside is that your brain doesn’t differentiate between the things that help you and the things that hinder you. All it does is watch what you do and recognise when you do something repeatedly. Then it assumes that’s something you want to keep doing, and tries to help you by hardwiring a habit in your brain.

And that’s why you find yourself doing certain things without thinking, day after day. Even things that don’t serve you in any way.

The good news is – you can change the programme. You can switch off the habits that hold you back, and instead create new habits and new thoughts that power up your energy, your productivity and your performance.

Creating good habits is a game changer. It’s perhaps one of the most important business shifts you’ll ever make, because habits underpin everything. Good habits help you do better things, and they help you do them in a way that feels much more effortless. Bad habits make success an uphill struggle, to be honest. The art is to reprogramme them.

It’s not hard to reprogramme your daily habits, but it does require care and focus. It starts with some honest evaluation to figure out what habits are sabotaging you, what triggers them, and what healthy alternatives you can find to better serve you… in a way that makes you (and that super-computer in your brain) feel rewarded enough to really embrace and embed those new habits.

It takes some well-proven mindset work to write the code for your brain’s new programmes. And then it takes mindful, conscious and repetitive action – and don’t worry, there are lots of simple tools and techniques to make this easy and memorable.

There are varying schools of thought about how long it takes to embed a new habit. Some studies suggest 21 days, while others put the sweet spot at somewhere closer to 90 days. But what’s most important is repeated and consistent action while the brain lays down its new habit-forming patterns.

So, in summary – the art is to replace your bad habits with productive and healthy habits, and the reward is being shifted on to a path where success is easier and greater.

And if you are ready to get the results you dream of, and make your business life more effortless and productive….and if you’d like to know more about how great coaching and mentoring can help you banish your bad habits and create incredibly helpful ones in their place, send me a DM and let’s connect.