“A business executive’s habits are amongst the most important factors that determine whether he or she will be a success – or a failure” J. Paul Getty

What are habits?

Habits are repeated behaviours, thoughts and actions that are automatic. Habits are useful, if not essential to life: we simply wouldn’t be able to function without habits. From the moment you wake and throughout the day, our day is full of those automatic actions that move us smoothly through life.

Think of any action that we take, even the most mundane like brushing our teeth. Imagine if you had to think consciously about brushing your teeth every day – twice a day. Then getting dressed and tying your shoelaces. By the time you are ready for the office you would already be exhausted and we haven’t even mentioned all the habits of etiquette – the social glue that keeps society functioning.

We have survived as a species exactly because habits are automatic. In evolutionary terms, this leaves us free to concentrate on physical threats to our existence or opportunities to find food.
All well and good then. Habits keep us alive and help us to learn new important skills. Except, not all habits are useful.

Bad Habits

As we have already suggested, habits are automatic, meaning that you don’t need to think about them. If any habit results in negative results, it’s a bad habit.

What is a bad habit

A bad habit is any repeated thought or action that results undesirable outcomes. Bad habits can also be the language that you use. Thoughts, words and actions are all linked together. Words can influence your thoughts, which then influence your actions. So be very careful what you say, because habitual negative language, will affect your thinking. If the results in your life aren’t what you want, then examine the language that you use.
Other bad habits may be just mindless activity. Do you eat when you are not hungry, in front of the TV? This is just a mindless bad habit.

Breaking bad habits

Once you become aware of the bad habit, you have already begun the process of breaking that bad habit. You are now aware. It is no longer mindless. This is therefore the first thing you should focus on when trying to break a bad habit. Become aware of it. Eat thoughtfully. Ask yourself ‘Am I really hungry?’’Do I really like the taste of this food?’ ‘How does it make me feel?’ When you become mindful about your habits, those that don’t serve you are exposed for what they are. You will be surprised to find that you can then easily change those habits.

Small habits

To change a small habit, simply perform a new habit for 21 consecutive days. It should then be permanent.

Another way to change small habits is to use reminders and props. Say that, for instance, you are in the habit of misplacing your keys. You mindlessly place them down when you arrive home. How about if you actually designate a place for these keys to live. E.g. A small saucer or tray near the front door. This is where the keys live. Make an intention to decide a place where the keys will go. Then go and put the keys there now. Now write a little note for yourself to put the keys back every day. Put this note with the keys and take the note with you the next day. It won’t take long before you are habitually putting the keys back in their new home. Once it is a habit, you can forget the note. It will be automatic.

Large habits

Sometimes bad habits are just too large change in one go. Let’s use an example of over-eating. Perhaps after years of eating too much of the wrong foods, you find yourself a little over-weight. The first thing many people do is to try to change everything all at once – the crash diet. Diets don’t work for many reasons, but the main one is internal resistance to change. We are hard wired to resist change. Any change could be a threat to our existence. Your body is also physiologically designed to get you to eat. If you stop eating, many processes in your body switch on to avoid starvation. In short your body fights to get you to eat. There is only one winner in this battle.

What’s the answer then?

You can bypass your body’s in built drive to eat, by chunking down the habit to its smallest components. So in our overeating example, this large habit can be broken down into individual meals or snacks, or even parts of meals. In his book the Compound Effect, Darren Hardy talks about making the smallest of changes, to bypass our tendency to avoid change. Tiny changes go undetected by our subconscious mind. Minute changes to your eating habits will not threaten your existence.

So you can remove one sugary snack per week from our diet and this will not cause too much heartache. You could choose Monday morning as a snack free zone.

Now you might say to yourself, that such a small change and it will have no effect, so why bother? Well this is where the Compound Effect helps. Yes, removing one snack per week will have a negligible effect on your calorie intake, say 200 kcal. However, that is 10,400 kcal per year. If 3,500 kcal collates to one pound of fat, then this would equate to nearly 3 pounds lost over the year, with almost no effort.

And that is not all. Once you have this mini habit down, you could remove another snack per week. Then another and another.
If you have never tried this method, I can assure you that it gathers momentum. Slowly all manner of little habits will change. Within a year you will be transformed. I promise you.

By the way if you are looking to lose weight contact me and I will show you how I did it.

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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.

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