“To be excellent we cannot simply think or feel excellent, we must act excellently” Aristotle.
Do you have some habits that stop you acting in an ‘excellent way’, either at work or home? Do you need to work on adopting some positive habits to assist you to achieve your goals?
Positive habits are hard to keep. 80% of us break our new year’s resolutions. Neuroscience informs us that brains have the capacity to change from the cradle to the grave, so why is changing behaviour so hard?
The key to sustaining positive change is to turn each desired action into a habit, so each change becomes automatic, without thought or choice.
A habit is a formula our brain automatically follows. The action becomes automatic. Over time our habits have an enormous impact on our work, health, productivity, financial security and happiness. Forming good habits today will automatically give good returns for years to come at work and at home.
Research shows us that any habit can be changed once we know how they function. Habits can be rebuilt and thus we have the responsibility to remake habits that do not serve us well.
How do we create good habits? Habits become cemented into our brain through the reinforcement of mindmaps, thus requiring an effort to change. Habits form because our brain changes in response to frequent practice.
A practical thing you can do to assist the adoption of a good habit is to make it easy to perform the task you wish to adopt.
Once your brain starts to tip toward a habit it keeps naturally heading toward that direction, following the path of least resistance. The key to creating new habits is ritual, repeated practice until the action becomes imbedded into your brain’s neural chemistry.
The key to daily practice is to put your desired action as close to the path of least resistance as possible. I call this scripting your Winning Plan.
For every good habit you wish to introduce, spend time working out and implementing your Winning Plan. What are the small practical things you can do to remove any points of resistance?
Look at your Wining Plan on a daily basis.
Remember, your habits are what you choose them to be.
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