Transform Your Life Using the Success Habit

Wouldn’t it be great to have a ‘success habit’ as opposed to a ‘failure habit’? Consider for a moment just what a habit is. Habits are fundamental to human behaviour; in fact they are so ingrained in our make-up that most of the time we don’t even realise have them. I want you to stop and think very carefully about this next statement..... Habits are one of the single most powerful forces that shape our lives.

Let me give you some examples. Poor personal hygiene habits spread disease not just on a local level but on a global scale. Just think of the recent swine flu pandemic. In addition; bad personal habits like smoking and drinking also lead to cancer, infidelity, marriage break up and even murder.

Good habits like working hard and doing your best and being dedicated have equally positive effects like preventing disease, generating success and wealth and generally enriching our lives. Think about it, something that is shaping your daily life and determining what you get out of life and you pay scant attention to it. The good news is that habits give us the means to achieve almost anything we want effortlessly through the process of ‘practice makes perfect’.

Think for a moment of how you learned to walk, talk, ride a bike, drive a car, play a sport. At first the task seemed almost impossible, you stumbled, mumbled, fell off, stalled and dropped the ball. Through practice you were able to achieve your goal and became so good at walking and running, talking, riding a bike and driving a car that it became automatic and effortless.

This is the whole reason for habits; they make difficult tasks easy through repetitive practice. This is what makes a habit so powerful. It means that with persistence you can achieve practically anything no matter how difficult it may seem to you at this time.

Let’s look at how habits are formed so we can understand how to harness their power. All habits are driven by a feedback mechanism to the brain. As an example, let’s look at the negative habit that people develop such as smoking. When you smoke, as I did, it tasted horrible and nasty; it made you cough and makes some people sick. The assault on the body’s senses is so powerful that you would think that most people would never start smoking.

However, with persistence and peer pressure many youngsters do smoke and the smoking sensation kicks in and they grow to become adult smokers. Smoking causes a light headed high, relaxing and making you slightly giddy and then after a few minutes, the feeling is gone. You want to do it again, so you do and over time your mind becomes used the sensation and it doesn’t feel as strong; so you try repeatedly to get that feeling again by smoking more until the smoking habit is formed.

After a while barely feel anything when you inhale the cigarette smoke now but still you do it. A habit is born and you are hooked and it is very difficult to break this cycle. This is because the brain is so affected by the initial sensation it continues to seek out that feeling. All the circumstances that surround smoking, like buying them, storing them, lighting them and having one after food or with a drink form connections to the habit and drive it deeper into your mind.

This is what I call a negative cycle of desire. It works like this; you smoke, it makes you feel good, you want to do it again. You repeat this until it becomes so embedded in your behaviour that you barely realise you do it. The reason this is negative is that it starts to affect your health; your skin becomes thinner, wrinkled before its time and aged looking. Eventually your lungs become clogged as do your arteries. A stroke, heart attack or cancer beckons.

What we need to do in order to break a negative habit is gain a deep understanding of the consequences of the habit and set up a positive cycle of desire for health, more money and happiness in this case. Successful formation of a habit makes the thing you want to do effortless and happen automatically and without thinking. That is the acid test of a formed habit.

Some people estimate that a new habit can be formed in 21 days or 30 days. Others will suggest 40 days or 90 days. My belief is that the more difficult the habit the longer it will take to form. The first thing to do is thoroughly understand the habit, how it works, what it will make you feel like and what the negative and positive consequences of the habit are going to be. Write these down, memorise them, study them and then you must to commit to the new habit in a MASSIVE way and persist with it and never give up trying to form it.

Let’s take the development of a ‘time keeping’ habit as an example. It may seem a small thing but the discipline of time keeping probably loses us many opportunities in our business and personal lives because we were late for some important meeting or other event.

The benefits of our new time keeping habit at first glance seem quite general but really are very specific. Good time keeping strengthens your career, helps you make more sales, develop better work relations, prospects for promotion and advancement. On the personal front it leads to better relationships with family and friends and you being seen as more dependable and being loved all the more for it. Good time keeping requires good organisation and planning and this is where your effort needs to go.

You will need to plan out the things you have to do in order to create this new habit. It may be to go to bed earlier, get things ready the day before and plan ahead. These tasks are the real habits you will develop in order to form a habit of good time keeping. They are the things you should focus on.

A couple of humorous things that always inspire me are Scrat; the manic squirrel from the movie Ice Age and my six month old border collie Angel. Scrat is to acorns what Angel is to a tennis ball. The level of intent, desire, focus and sheer determination to have the object of their desire is unshakable. I swear if I had but a tithe of the intent, focus and desire of Scrat or even my Angel I would be a thousand times farther down the road towards the goals I have planned for me and my family than I am today.

Decide up front how long it will take you to form the habit, make it a long time, like 90 days and keep a note of each day that you achieved your goal of sticking to your habit. Once you have done it successfully for 90 days in a row, you have formed your habit. Never give up, even if you fall by the wayside for a day or two. Just start again with more determination, see yourself doing it in your mind, and go at it once more like you did when you fell over as a child trying to walk. Do this and you are on your way to developing a ‘success habit’. Create 4 or 5 new habits each year and within two years you will be a person transformed. Good luck.