Good Habits

When you remove bad habits, there could be a void that needs filling. Nature abhors a vacuum as the saying goes, so be mindful about what you replace bad habits with. It would be awful to remove the smoking habit only for you to replace it with an unhealthy addiction to sugary snacks.
You are therefore going to form new good habits to replace the bad ones.

How many

When I first got into personal development, I wanted to change everything overnight, removing many bad habits and forming loads of new ones. I also took on too many projects and created umpteen goals. The result was a disaster. As I said before be gentle with yourself. Less is more.
As you remove one bad habit, think of ONE good habit to replace it with. You might think that it will take an age to create meaningful change in your life, by forming just one new habit at a time. Through my experience and that of my clients, this is not the case. Go slow to create permanent results.

Forming a new habit

Let’s use an example of wanting to form a regular exercise habit. What always helps me with a new habit is clearing a specific time every day to perform the habit. This is so important. The set time every day is even more important than the exercise itself. So when is the best time to exercise? When you are most likely to do it, that’s when.
Break your new habit down into the smallest components. For instance a goal of running 3 miles every day, when you currently don’t do any exercise is doomed to failure. It would be better to set the goal of, say, walking five minutes every day for 21 days.

Kaizen

Robert D. Maurer in his book The Kaizen Way goes even further than this. He would recommend just getting in the habit of putting your running shoes on at the same time every day for 3 weeks. That’s it. If you do venture outside, great. If not, that’s great to because you are forming a new habit. Remember, I said before that with setting the habit of exercise, the time is more important than the actual exercise itself. This is because you are training your brain. You are creating new neural pathways that are hard to overcome. Why is this important?

Relapse

Creating the habit of a set exercise time is more important than the actual exercise itself, because some days you will fail. Yes, some days you will miss your exercise time. But, and it’s a big but, because you have the habit of a set exercise time, you will easily click back into the habit soon enough.

Ramping up

So now you are in the habit of putting your trainers on, it’s such a small effort to actually get outside and go for a walk. Then soon you will be walking for longer and further. As your strength and cardiovascular fitness increase, you might find yourself putting in a little jog. Pretty soon you will jog the whole mile, then two then three. Who knows in a year you might run a marathon.