Start New Habits Today
Goals, Success, and Growth don’t come about with plans alone: they require good habits. Habits — or behaviors — that produce the right results.
But habits, we all know, are hard to break. This means they are also hard to form: for every new habit we must break an old one.
Here are a few tips for creating the habits that lead to your success.
Make them visible
The first step to changing your habits is to create reminders and prompts.
The simplest way to not perform a new habit is to simply forget about it.
Make sure you remember by making your new habit visible.
This can mean post-it reminders in crucial spots, or placing the tools you need for the habit in open, clearly visible, spots.
Create constant reminders of what you want to be doing until it becomes the norm.
Make them easy
Know what you have to do.
We use up large amounts of mental energy just in making decisions. Every time you have to decide what to do next, or how to do it, you are tiring yourself out.
The more decisions you have to make about sticking to your habit, the more tired it will make you, the less likely you are to stick with it: it becomes a burden rather than a boon.
Front-load your decisions: take the time to determine how a new habit must be performed. Decide upfront what you must have and what you must know to be successful. Let the habit be, well, a simple habit, with all decisions made beforehand.
Make them fun
Fun can take two forms: fun in execution and fun in reward.
As much as you can, make the new habit fun to perform. By making it easy and visible you have already performed half the battle here. But examine how the new habit happens, and make sure that you are folding it into your everyday life in a way that you enjoy.
And keep your eye on the prize. Know why you are performing the new habit, and use that desired result as your motivation to persevere.
Keep making new habits visible, easy, and fun, and you will be in your new growth mode before you know it.