It is time to get real again. Real with yourself about your bad habits. There is a quote that has been following me around for days now. I follow a lot of inspirational and motivational social media accounts* and almost all of them have posted the same quote, which led me to do some reading and investigating about the concepts stated in it. The quote is by John C. Maxwell, most of you will know it.
It goes as followed:
Even though routines drive me crazy, I cannot help but think that there is a form of truth in this quote. I mean when I started making little changes a lot changed unintentionally. I actually did change what I do on a day to day basis. I added and subtracted till I came to a happy point. Even now, I am still messing with that equation.
Whether that all will lead to actual success is another argument to fight about. I do however think that if something in your daily routine is blocking you from reaching your goal then it is worth finding out about. By watching various videos and reading articles about him it became clear, I think, what he is talking about. He means that when you work on your goals, or actually your plan to reach your goal you will become a success. I agree, that is the sole reason why I break down all my goals into plans that I work on daily.
However when I first read the quote I thought about it differently. I thought about it as in finding ways to work more efficiently, smarter, keeping yourself motivated etcetera. I figure that there are more ways of thinking about this. I understand what he means and agree with him but when thinking about this quote I was also thinking about bad habits. They are also, often, something you do daily. I cannot imagine that they will lead to success. Seeing that they are called “bad habits“.
It is obvious that they are or could be standing in the way of me and you reaching our goals. Now changing habits is hard. We are so used to some of them that we do not even notice that we are doing it. Now getting rid of them completely would be fabulous but I am human so fear that this is not possible. Instead I can try to get them at the lowest point possible, I think then there is a chance I might be working towards my goals better than I am now. Time to get real.
How I found my bad habits
I focused on my little personal annoyances about myself. I wrote them down. I thought about the things I am fully aware that are not helping My Story Of I. Terrible is it not? I am aware that it is bad yet I still do it. Anyways continuing, I kept tabs during the week on what went wrong and why. For example I had to run like an Olympian to catch the train. Why? Because I didn’t prepare all the things I needed in the morning, which on this particular morning was a lot. The night before I worked on the Blog instead. All this I wrote down and also events similar to the one described above. You can say that everything that was a(n) (slight) inconvenience and I was at fault because of an action I did or didn’t do I wrote down. I also wrote down things that just went blatantly wrong so I could look at them in depth when categorizing.
I categorized everything in actions. So in the example above the action would be ”Didn’t prepare my bags” . Under that I wrote down why it was a bad habit. In this case it is because not being prepared in the morning causes me to miss my train. I didn’t say ”be late” as that is not a specific enough cause-effect chain. Before I can be late I still have to miss the train and luckily now my inner Olympian saved me (just for the record I am in no way or form an Olympian I just channel them when I have to run ungodly amounts unexpectedly and against my will). The specific why is important because it made me aware of what I was doing. By being specific with the why you become consciously aware of how you are exactly (accidently) ruining your own life. Be honest in this, get real, you are helping yourself become a better you for you.
If you want to tackle more than just your bad habits then my eBook: ”Starter Steps To Creating A Life Story You Love” is perfect for you. It reveals the exact steps I took to make sure I no longer engage in behaviors that don’t help advance my life while also showing you how I rebuilt my entire life as if starting from scratch!
I do have to admit that the why is sometimes quite hard to figure out as in our perception sometimes it seems as if things happen just because. At some point we start living life on auto pilot and thus become completely oblivious to why we do certain things or why certain things happen. Now of course not everything is in your control so for some events there isn’t a real reason, that you know of. That’s why I focused on my actions, as this narrows it down to things I have control over. It trickles down all the way to the simple basic of cause-effect.
Next to that focusing on the why of the action also helps being specific in knowing what bad habit you want and need to tackle. It’s important to realize that it could very well be a series of actions. These series of bad habits can be following each other up because they belong together or because out of your own habit you do them one after the other as a chain reaction. An example of such a chain reaction is watching a movie and needing a bag of chips and a soda.
Now that we know and are consciously aware, the next part is discontinuing the bad habits which you can find how to do right here.
Goodluck!
Love,
DCPR.
*Credits go to them for inspiring me to write this.
Leave a Reply