7 Steps to Breaking Bad Habits

Are you wanting better health?

Are you wanting to be more successful?

Are you wanting to have better relationships?

• Habit’s as we know them can be either good or bad.
• Habit’s can be ignored.
• Habit’s can be changed.
• Habit’s can be replaced.

2. ALL HABITS ARE LEARNED

The good news about habits is that all habits are learned, as the result of practice and repetition.

You can learn any habit that you consider either desirable or necessary. By using your willpower and discipline, you can shape your personality and character in almost any way you desire.

You can write the script of your own life, and if you are not happy with the current script, you can rip it up and write a better one and start again.

Just as your good habits are responsible for most of your success and happiness today, your bad habits are responsible for most of your problems and frustrations.

But since bad habits are learned as well, they can be unlearned and replaced with good habits by the same process of practice and repetition.

3. FOCUS ON WHAT YOU WANT

In today’s noisy world, it’s easy to get distracted, and lose focus.

Scientists have discovered focusing on changing one BAD HABIT at first will propel you forward. By focusing on one pattern, also know as a “Keystone Habit” people can teach themselves how to reprogram the other routines in their life.

It’s not just individuals who are capable of such shifts. When companies focus on changing habits, social media marketing habits, whole organizations can transform.

Firms such as Procter & Gamble, Starbucks, Facebook, and Google have seized on this insight to influence how work gets done, how employees communicate, and –without customers realizing it–the way people shop.

Big brands as well as small business has had to adopt to Social Media Content Marketing . The pace of social media platforms changing each week, and you don’t get the memo. Right?

When I do Social Media Coaching I get to know you and your business. What are your goals and mission. Adding this layer of marketing to your daily routine requires changes in habit, but there is a good reward if the social media strategy plan is followed.

Lack of persistence is one of the crippling habits I see. Life Happens…Right? Goes back to how focused and committed are you? How bad do you want it? Do you believe it is possible for you to learn new skills no matter your age. Then have the confidence to pull it off! Look to #7 about beliefs to shore up your self limiting beliefs.

When you woke up this morning, what did you do first?

Our life is a mass of habits. William James wrote in 1892, most of the choices we make each day may feel like the products of well-considered decision making, but they’re not.

They’re HABITS.

4. YOU ARE IN COMPLETE CONTROL

The fact is that good habits are hard to form, but easy to live with. Bad habits, on the other hand, are easy to form, but hard to live with. In either case, you develop either good or bad habits as the result of your choices, decisions and behaviors.

Horace Mann said, “Habits are like a cable. We weave a strand of it every day and soon it cannot be broken.”

One of your great goals in life should be to develop the habits that lead to health, happiness and true prosperity. Your aim should be to develop the habits of character that enable you to be the very best person that you can imagine yourself becoming.

The high purpose of your life should be to ingrain within yourself the habits that enable you to fulfill your full potential.

“We first make out habits, and then our habits make us.” (John Dryden)

5. THE HABIT LOOP

This process within our brains is a three-step loop.

1. The Cue
A trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use.
2. The Routine
Which can be either physical, mental, or emotional.
3. The Reward
Which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future.

Over time, this loop-cue, routine, reward – becomes more and more automatic. The cue and reward become intertwined until a powerful sense of anticipation and craving emerges. Eventually a habit is born.

6. HOW TO CREATE NEW HABITS

Want to craft a new eating habit? When researchers affiliated with the National Weight Control Registry — a project involving more than six thousand people who have lost more than thirty pounds. They looked at the habits of successful dieters, they found that 78% of them ate breakfast every morning, a meal cued by a time of day.

The most successful dieters also envisioned a specific reward for sticking with their diet — a bikini they want to wear or the sense of pride they felt when they stepped on the scale each day. Something they chose carefully and really wanted.

They focused on the craving for that reward when temptations arose, cultivating the craving into a mild obsession. Their cravings for reward crowded out the temptation to drop the diet according to researchers.

The cravings drove the HABIT LOOP.

Cravings are what drives habits. Figuring out how to spark a craving makes creating a new habit easier. And…I don’t mean SUGAR.

THE GOLDEN RULE OF HABIT CHANGE

Photo: Tim Ferriss Four Hour Workweek

If you identify the cues and rewards, you can change the routine.

At least, most of the time. For some habits, however, there’s one other ingredient that’s necessary:

BELIEF

7. THE POWER OF BELIEF

Law of Belief. This is the basic principle that underlies most religion, psychology, philosophy and metaphysics. The Law of Belief says that, “Whatever you believe, with conviction, becomes your reality.”

William James of Harvard wrote, “Belief creates the actual fact.”

The fact is that, “You do not believe what you see, but rather, you see what you already believe.” Your deeply held beliefs form a screen of prejudices that distort your external reality and cause you to see things not the way they are, but the way you are.

The worst of all beliefs are self-limiting beliefs. These are beliefs that you have developed through life, usually false, that cause you to believe that you are limited in some way.

Your negative beliefs soon become habitual ways of thinking. You may believe that you lack:

• Intelligence
• Creativity
• Personality
• Success in Business
• The ability to speak publicly
• The ability to earn a high income
• The ability to lose weight
• Or the ability to achieve your goals

As a result of your self-limiting beliefs, you continually “sell yourself short,” give up easily in the pursuit of a goal, and even worse, tell other people around you that you lack certain qualities or abilities. Your beliefs then become your realities.

“You are not what you think you are, but what you think,you are.”

When you develop your mind to the point where you absolutely believe that you can do anything you put your mind to, you will find a way to make that belief a reality. As a result, your whole life will change.

Beliefs are one of the hardest things of all to change. But there is good news. All beliefs are learned. And anything that has been learned can be unlearned. You can develop the beliefs of courage, confidence and unstoppable persistence that you need for great success by reprogramming your subconscious mind in a specific way.

ACTION EXERCISES

1. Identify a Habit that you want to change or replace, and write it down..
2. Write down as many why’s as you can for wanting to change or replace this habit.
3. Visualize how you would feel if you mastered this Good Habit.
4. Work on developing an Internal Locus of Control. You are in control, which will lead to greater success, and happiness.
5. Repeat daily I am responsible!
6. Develop a strong belief for change.”Whatever you believe, with conviction, becomes your reality.”

7. NOW GO TAKE SOME ACTION!!!