Creating Success from the Inside Out - Developing Success Habits

This being the beginning of a new year and a time when we usually resolve to improve ourselves and our lives in some way, I think it’s a good time to put the spotlight on habits.  Whether you realize it or not, habits make your world go round.  From the way you brush your teeth to the time that you eat breakfast each morning you have a way of moving through the world that is both routine and automatic.  Imagine if you developed some new habits that have the power to propel you further in life and/or your business – habits that promote your success.  How great would that be?

Greeting Card from Wishbone Letterpress

Yet another principle in Jack Canfield’s Success Principles book offers suggestions for implementing new habits of success.  Come up with four new habits that you would like to adopt this year.  To generate this list, you may want to write a list of your bad or unproductive habits first and from there develop your new “success habits”, as Canfield refers to them.

Here are some unproductive habits that came to mind to get your juices flowing:

·         TV channel surfing

·         Reading the whole internet in one sitting

·         Going to bed late/not getting the sleep you need to function properly

·         Procrastinating

·         Blending work time with family time

·         Avoiding the things you don’t like to do

·         Starting a project and not finishing it

·         Arriving late for appointments/meetings

·         Not returning calls/emails in a timely manner

When you have created your own list of those habits that hold you back from being/doing your best, use it to generate a list of four success habits.  Don’t worry about adopting them all at once.  As we all know, it takes a lot of effort to create new habits and rid our lives of pesky bad ones.  From your list of four habits, pinpoint one that you would like to focus on for the first 13 weeks of the year.  Once you have adopted that habit, you can move to the second and so on. 

That’s the easy part…

How will you ensure that you stick with it for the time it takes for a new way of doing/being to become a habit?  If you spend too much time TV channel surfing, maybe you can set an alarm for yourself so that your TV time is limited.  If you avoid the things you don’t like to do, perhaps each evening you can write a checklist of the three most important tasks you need to accomplish the next day.  Then, do those three most important things first and don’t do anything else until those tasks are done.  These are just suggestions to help you get the idea of what type of action plan you must put in place for yourself for the habit that you are trying to develop to ensure successful adoption.

Points Tracker Bracelet from Tinks Treasure

Here are my success habits that I am going to try to develop, in the order in which I plan to adopt them:

1.       Drink 8 glasses of water a day

2.       Take my vitamins EVERY DAY

3.       Spend 5 minutes every morning acknowledging all that I have to be grateful for

4.       Spend 5 minutes each evening visualizing my business goal and experiencing the feelings of it already coming to fruition

To tackle that first one, I plan to put sticky notes everywhere to remind me to drink my water, get my husband to text me to remind me to drink my water, and put it into my calendar. 

What are your success habits and how do you plan to follow through to adoption?

Good luck!