Are your habits creating the life of your dreams, or limiting you to ‘just getting by’?
Let me explain …
Habits can be either Positive or Negative. Positive habits can build the life of your dreams while negative habits create a life of ‘just getting by’. By repeating your habits over and over for a long period of time, you reinforce them, which can make them harder to change. They are also a mirror of what you really think and how you feel about yourself and life.
To improve your life you need to improve your habits. The following 7 guidelines can help you to develop these new ‘winning’ habits:
1. The Habit of Goal-setting
Knowing exactly what you want and why you want it are two of the most important discoveries you’ll ever make about your life. Without goals there’s a tendency to just drift through life accepting whatever comes your way or to make excuses for what’s not coming your way.
Instead of allowing this to happen why not plan to make your dreams and desires a reality! One of the most effective and simplest, yet least used exercises is goal-setting. Having a list of all of your goals gives you a clear picture of what you do want in life instead of what you don’t want.
2. The Habit of Focus
Being able to focus on what you want will make it happen faster. Focusing consciously is a skill that you get better at with practice. It’s a muscle skill, it gets stronger the more you flex it.
3. The Habit of Passion
How much of a winner would you consider yourself to be, if you were doing exactly what you wanted to do every day? Passion is the most powerful driving force available to you to create the life of you’ve always dreamed of.
It has created success out of failure, and allowed ordinary people to live extra-ordinary lives and yet the number of people who allow themselves to live without it, is staggering. Passion is available to everyone, it’s just a matter of discovering the particular switch inside you that turns it on.
Once you find your ‘passion switch’ you will never look back.
4. The Habit of Confidence
Have you ever noticed that the world looks bigger and brighter when you feel confident?
Self-confidence is a high energy state that allows you to enjoy and expand your life. An important fact to remember is that confidence is a learned ability and it comes as the result of developing certain skills, and being okay with who you are.
A really good affirmation that helps with improving self-confidence is. ‘I am okay, no matter what I am thinking or feeling’.
5. The Habit of Peak Performance
As you probably know having a high energy level is a must for accomplishing what you want. Without the physical stamina to keep up with the demands of everyday living, you won’t have the energy left to complete the tasks necessary for improving the quality of your life.
What most people neglect are their emotional and mental stamina. What are you currently doing, to maintain and increase them? Remember that when your energy levels are low not only are you prone to tiredness, and emotion or mood swings but you can then fall into apathy.
All of these factors will undermine your ability to achieve the quality of life you want. Keeping in great shape physically, mentally and emotionally is ensuring that you are in a resourceful state, which is the foundation for peak performance.
6. The Habit of Prioritizing
List your values and then put them in order of importance. Time is a limited resource yet the demands made upon you are unlimited. By prioritizing, you are choosing to focus on achieving what is most valuable to you. The reward for this is an extraordinary quality of life.
7. The Habit of Balance
The final step is balancing all the different areas in your life, giving the right amount of attention and energy to each area of your life as it’s needed. Balance comes from self-management, which can be challenging in the beginning but with the continuous application of life skills is achievable.
By taking the time to develop these 7 winning habits you will transform any area of your life that you focus on. Everything you do comes form a habit. Even procrastination or making excuses are habits. The only difference between winners and losers in life are the habits that they cultivate most of the time.
Just look around you at the people you know who excel in areas that you want to excel in and then observe what their habits are in this area. You will soon see why they have such great health and fitness, or such amazing prosperity, or such powerful relationships.
The rule of thumb is that you need to work on any new habit every day for 30 days in a row until it becomes part of your everyday routines. Then, you won’t need to think about it as you’ll be doing it automatically. This short investment of time will yield massive returns in the long run.
