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10 Steps to Building Successful
Habits
by Mac Anderson and John J. Murphy
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We are all creatures of habit and if you make good
habits, good habits will make you. This wisdom has been around since
ancient times. Aristotle once said, "We are what we repeatedly
do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit."
The subconscious mind—the habitual mind—is over one million times
more powerful than the conscious mind. This means that we spend a
substantial amount of our lifetime on "autopilot," playing
out the mental programs that govern our behavior. | | |
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For example, while driving a car and carrying on a
conversation with someone,
the conscious mind is attending to what is
being said in the moment while
the subconscious mind is turning on
the turn signal, hitting the brakes,
attending to oncoming traffic,
monitoring our blood sugar, regulating our
breathing, planning our next
move and on and on. The subconscious mind is
so vast and so powerful
that we do not even know what it is thinking or
capable of. It truly
runs our lives—whether we know it or not!
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Habits begin and manifest deep in
the mind and they can be friends or foes.
Good habits can make our
lives easier, helping us to do the more mundane things
of life
without thinking about them, like automatically depositing your
paycheck.
But, as all of us know all too well, habits can also be
destructive...to our
health, to our finances, to our relationships.
It's why we struggle with losing
weight, paying off our credit cards
or quitting smoking...to name a few "bad habits."
Whether they are a positive force in
our lives or obstacles to the goals
we want to achieve, habits become
ingrained through repeated actions.
Here is a little test to display the power of our habits. Cross your
arms as you
normally would, and look down to see which one is on top.
About half of you
will have your right arm on top and the other half
will have their left on top.
When you crossed your arms for the very
first time, you might have been
still in your playpen, and you have
been crossing your arms the same way
ever since. Now, cross your arms
again, but this time put the opposite arm
on top. It feels extremely
weird! If you were to challenge yourself to cross
your arms the
"wrong" way for the rest of your life, could you do it?
Probably.
Would it be difficult? You bet it would!
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The real key to success is replacing destructive
habits with successful habits.
To win—to break self-defeating
attitudes and behaviors—we must
understand that we have the power to
choose and the power to change.
We have the power to let go of old
thinking and adopt the mindset of a champion.
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