Transforming Your Habits & Routines

You are what you do. 

This is true for the individual and it’s true for businesses, too. 

People and businesses alike might want to do good work, but their efforts don’t match their intentions. 

This is bound to happen without the right habits and routines. 

Understanding the formation of habits is crucial to breaking bad ones and creating good ones. 

There has been a lot said about the power of habits in books like Atomic Habits and The Power of Habit, by authors James Clear and Charles Duhigg, respectively. 

If you haven’t checked out those books, you should! They’ll help you understand and leverage habits to help you achieve your personal and professional goals. 

There are two ways to transform your habits and routines: Deconstruct Bad Habits and Create Good Habits.

Deconstruct Bad Habits

Bad habits take many forms, like excessive web surfing 🌊 or procrastination, to just name a few. 

No matter your bad habits, there’s a process to deconstruct them. And it starts with awareness. 

Whenever you start your bad habit, ask yourself, ‘What is the trigger?’. 

What caused me to perform this action? Let’s say your bad habit is mindlessly scrolling through the internet. 

Getting an email might be a trigger that ignites your bad habit. You get the email, go to answer it, and find yourself stuck on the internet, happily scrolling away. 

Once you know the trigger, you can set up the proper guardrails to keep you from your bad habit.

Sometimes, it won’t be so obvious how to identify your triggers. 

Journaling is an insightful way to glean your thoughts and environment before a trigger occurs. 

Create Good Habits

While deconstructing bad habits, we want to create good habits that propel us to our goals. 

In order to create truly good habits, you need to have goals. 

Each time you repeat a habit with a goal in mind, you take a deliberate step in that direction. 

Don’t let distractions or temporary setbacks derail you from forming good habits. Good habits can take time to create. Sometimes, a habit is good because it ensures that you keep your reps up. So much of life and business is about doing the same thing repeatedly, knowing you’ll eventually get your desired results. 

In baseball, making an out 70% of the time makes you a great hitter. In sales, you won’t close every single prospect. 

Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Therefore, excellence is not an act but a habit.”

When you intentionally deconstruct bad habits and replace them with good habits, you put yourself on the right path to achieving your personal and professional goals.