Your habits speak volumes. Are you usually punctual or late? Are you generally inspired or lethargic and careless? Are you optimistic or pessimistic?
We are daily faced with both decision making and the consequences thereof. Be it in traffic, in relationships, at home, at work…at life, at everything. Constant, unending decision making. What to eat, , what to wear, what to say, where to go, who to call, when to leave, how much to spend, how much to save, how much to give. Sounds familiar?
Sadly because our minds are largely in auto pilot, we are unconscious that we are actually making decisions, much akin to your automobile shifting gears, automatically. There is nothing automatic about it. Its programmed according to a series of inputs or variables which determine the actions and outcomes. You may not be shifting the gears in your car but the machinery certainly is. You too have been programmed. Programmed by your previous inputs (thoughts, words, actions and inactions). From such programming, your patterns have become ingrained through repeated processing, making them habit. You have found a pattern in your conscious decision making, our learned patterns becomes the standard, becoming habitual.
Habits are unconscious and can either be detaining or massively liberating. Bad habits are easy to form but hard to live with while success habits, are hard to form but easy to live with. Success habits separate the survivors from the thrivers. If we want new outcomes we must develop new habits. Breaking bad habits such as self limiting thinking and behaviours, self sabotaging, are possible for you, if you really want.
All habits are practiced, thus the secret is to practice the habits you want to cultivate. If you repeat them consistently, a new neural pathway and process is created replacing the negative ones holding you back. The ones you stop using fade into the background while the practiced habit comes to the fore.
Here is the 8 Step Vinesh Maharaj Habit Changing System:
- Acknowledgment – Admitting you are held back by your habits is the starting point to change. Be truthful with yourself.
- Awareness – All new habits are built on awareness. Its this skill that will set you off into the new habits you want to create. Put reminders of the habit you wish to create, everywhere you go. On your mirror, on your mobile phone, on you notebook, on the sun visor of your car, on your refrigerator. Here is an example of how to break negative thinking: Write the following message and post it everywhere you look “I am a positive thinker and dwell on positive outcomes exclusively”. By reading and applying heartfelt conviction, neuroplasticity is occurring, giving you a chance to break the bad habit by replacing it with the new habit. Awareness is catching yourself performing the bad habit and simultaneously choosing the good habit over it.
- Associations – Choose the company of people who bring out your best, not worst. Association with like minded people make your habit forming behaviour a walk in the park.
- Acquire a sponsor – Find a relative, friend or colleague help you. Let them anchor you in your new habit by talking down the negative habit, while fueling your commitment to acquire the new habit.
- Associate penalties – Associate penalties that hurt and pay up when you act outside of your new habits.
- Add value – Choose a charity to serve as payment. You can pay in $’s or time to make their world a better place.
- Actions create results – Act as if you wanted to change the world and not just your habit. I assure you if its debilitating you, its debilitating the whole world. Become an advocate and act consistently with the person you want to become.
- Accommodating – Remember it took a lifetime or many million repeated thoughts, words and acts to create your current patterns. Should you not succeed at first, keep trying. Be accommodating that you may not just get it right on day one but persist until you do.
Aristotle said it concisely; “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit”. All success and personal mastery is borne out of habit. Thus if we want to be more effective and want results we can be proud of, we must pursue habit mastery.
Control your habits, don’t let them control you!
I’m your coach and partner in success
Vinesh Maharaj
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Vinesh Maharaj: Your coach and partner in success 