My New Year’s resolution this year was to keep last years resolutions. The strange part is, I am using this New Year resolution for the past three years, and nothing has changed ever since I first resolved. The first step towards getting somewhere is to decide that you are not going to stay where you are today. Change is painful. Moreover, once a bad habit is formed, it’s challenging to change the habit.
Being an Entrepreneur take a lot of patience, time, and decision making. From creating a website yourself or using a professional web design agency to do that for you. From writing memos to mastering the art of firing people. Moreover, in the throes of it is breaking the bad habits which are wrecking the business and personal life. In a study, it was concluded that more than 70% of the Americans have at least one bad habit that can cut-down their lifespan.
James Clear, in his latest book, Atomic Habits warns us that “Bad habits interrupt your life and prevent you from accomplishing your goals.”
As an Entrepreneur, we must learn how to break bad habits and build good ones. Your mind can only hold one thing at a time. If you fill your mind with good stuff, it will be easy for your brain to think good thoughts. This leads us to the first creative strategy to break the bad habit.
1. Start with a morning routine
According to Charles Duhigg in his book, The Power of Habit, “Out daily routines leave a remarkable influence on the decisions that we take throughout the day.” The first way to break a bad habit is to start with little noticeable changes in the morning.
If you control your morning routine, your brain will be tuned-in for success for the day. You don’t have to wait for another year to start this habit. You can start tomorrow. Sleep early today, and wake-up at 5 am tomorrow.
How you spend that one hour will set the tone of your whole day.
Start with medication. A research at Stanford Medicine center reveals that meditation can improve your ability to control your emotions. Another study concludes that medication can improve your focus.
Next in the list is reading or writing in a journal. Pick a book from your favorite author and read for half an hour. Take notes and read the notes from the previous day to retain ideas in your head. Increase your vocabulary. The more words you know, the more space you’ve to think.
After that, write everything in a journal. Write down all the bad decisions of yesterday and analyze what went wrong. By writing things down in a journal, you’ll be able to examine your thoughts and analyze the consequences of your decisions.
2. Replace the Bad Habit with a Good habit
When trying to break a bad habit, know that it will not be easy. You’ll be caught up in the thoughts of anxiety and stress. While it’s necessary to introspect your life, it’s essential to maintain a clear perspective of life.
The best way to eliminate a bad habit is to replace it with a good one. Use the power of visualization to change your neural networks and think of the habit that you want to replace with a bad habit.
For example, if you want to quit smoking, you can visualize going out for a walk or making tea for yourself when you feel like smoking. When you envision this enough, your imagination will convert into reality, and soon you’ll quit smoking without banging your head on the wall.
3. Learn to express more
In some cases, a bad habit is just a failure of expressing yourself. If you learn how to express yourself, you’ll be able to kill the bad habit. Discuss your habit with family, friends, or someone close. You can even request them to keep a watch on your bad habit and to correct you when you divert towards a bad habit. This can be fun if you play it like a game. If you talk it out with other people, you can get rid of the bad habit.
4. Find the Root cause of a Bad Habit
Find and address the root cause of bad habits. Understand the trigger points of your bad habits and see how you can address them. When you start journaling, this will help you find your critical weak points, and when you know how you are facing the problem, you’ll be able to deal with it.
Self-expression is an excellent way to deal with bad habits. When you understand the root cause of bad habits, you’ll be able to minimize their cause and eliminate them.
If you know, people who have bad habits leave them or change your company. Please don’t go near those people who have a nag of bad habits because they’ll throw some to you too. Drive the bad habits away by talking to people who are already successful. What measures did they take to drive their habits away?
To conclude it all
Habits are the gateway to success, or they can lead you to failure. You can either build yourself up by growing good habits, or you can keep going on the wrong road and expect magical things to happen by themselves.
There is no easy way to do anything. Everything good takes time. If you’re a severe Entrepreneur, you will work on your bad habits and focus on correcting them. As mentioned earlier, you can take help from journaling yourself and seeing how the things turn out.
You can learn from highly successful people and how they build powerful habits. Refer to Tim Ferriss’s excellent book, Tools of Titans. An excellent book that can teach you about how successful people think and sustain good habits. It is just a matter of time and patience that you’ll be trained to adopt the good habits and remove bad habits from your lifestyle.