Get ready to dig deep into your good and bad habits to pave the way for a successful body transformation.
“A habit is a routine or behaviour that is repeated regularly and tends to occur subconsciously.”
Our habits have a lot of power over us. They are ingrained and unconscious, and have often been part of our life for decades. But your unproductive habits are costing you results – at work, in your relationships, in your health and fitness. The fact that we don’t have to think about our habits can be a good thing (when they are helpful habits) or a big problem (when they are unproductive or damaging habits).
Ready to gain valuable insight into your own habits and see how they could be holding you back? Please get a big bit of paper and a pen and work through this article in your own time.
Clearly Identify Your Bad Habits
Write down all of your bad, unproductive, or damaging habits. This could be at work, home, in relationships, even the way you speak to yourself.
Common examples are procrastination, spending too much time on your phone, or negative self-talk. Go deep and take your time with this, you need to be honest and write down all of your bad habits.
The Consequences Of Bad Habits
Next to each habit, write down the consequence. What is that habit costing you or holding you back from? This could be to do with money, relationships, health, fitness, work…
You’ll start to see that all habits have knock-on effects and can work in a spiral.
Define New Actions For Bad Habits
Now comes the fun part! What would you like to do instead of those unconscious bad habits? Write down your replacement action for each habit on your list. Don’t hold back, imagine what your ideal self would do.
What Are The Benefits Of These New Habits?
We’ve talked about the consequences of bad habits, but we need to think about the benefits of good habits. Next to each replacement habit, write down how you’d feel, what you would achieve, and what progress you would make with this new action?
Using one of the examples above, it could look like this:
- My bad habit is procrastination over important tasks and leaving it to the last minute or saying I’ll do it another day
- The consequence of this is feeling stressed and overwhelmed, disappointed in myself, letting people down, and wasting a lot of time
- I would like to get things done on time, without stress, with plenty of notice.
- My new action for PROCRASTINATION is MANAGING MY TIME BETTER, PLANNING MY DAY IN ADVANCE, and DOING THE IMPORTANT THINGS FIRST
- The benefits of this would be much less stress, being a more reliable person, achieving more at work, making faster progress, and being proud of myself
Creating A Habit Statement
It’s important to understand that your bad habits started out as a protection mechanism. For example, nobody comes home after a terrible day at work and eats an entire pack of biscuits because they think it’s healthy. But habits aren’t logical.
The stressed person turns to the biscuits because they want to feel soothed, they want to carve out 10 minutes of peace where they can’t be expected to do anything else, and they just want to feel happy.
Of course, a packet of biscuits is not the best way to achieve any of these things. But the unconscious mind thinks it will work, and it’s a habit.
Identify what purpose your bad habits serve. Then can you replace the bad habit (response) with a positive one that gives you the same outcome.
Using our biscuit example above, the new habit statement might be:
I will have a hot bath and listen to music…
if I feel triggered by a stressful day at work…
as this gives me a feeling of PEACE, SOOTHING, and SANCTITY where no-one can ask me to do anything else.
Create that kind of Habit Statement for all your new habits.
Allow Habit Work To Transform Your Life
Doing this work around habits is powerful and life-changing. Be honest, go deep with this, and prepare to be amazed by how this impacts your progress.
Reach out to me if you need any help with this.
Speak to you next week,
