PRactical Relations

In his fantastic book, The Success Principles, Jack Canfield says that “whatever habits you currently have established are producing your current level of results”.

Now add to that the fact that, according to psychologists, 90% of our behaviour is habitual. From the way you get out of bed in the morning, to the way you eat your cereal, to the way you change gears in your car - these are all habits that you’ve created and you do them automatically without much thought involved.

Habits like these are incredibly useful, because what’s really happened is that you’ve repeated a particular activity so many times that you’ve stored it in your subconscious mind, which frees your conscious mind to concentrate on any other activity or thought.

As an example of this, remember when you first learned to drive a car? With all of the coordination and concentration required, it was very difficult to try and hold any kind of conversation at the same time. But after consistent practice, once the actions became habitual, you could then easily have a conversation with passengers, listen to the radio and perhaps even notice the billboards as you drive past.

Out with the bad, in with the good
Of course, the problem comes in when you have habits that don’t serve you. Because you’re doing many of these automatically from the subconscious mind, you’re not always aware that you’re doing it. So the first step to making any positive change is to first recognise what habits aren’t really working for you or helping you create the results you want.

But this is the easy part, right? With a little introspection you can spot the things you know you should change - like procrastinating on certain phone calls, arriving late for meetings, forgetting people’s names seconds after meeting them. But once you’ve decided what habits you plan to change, it’s important to come up with a support plan to keep you on track - and this is the hard part.

How many New Year’s resolutions have you really kept past the end of February? The truth is that habits aren’t too easy to replace, unless you understand the techniques of how to create and maintain new ones. In Jack Canfield’s book, he explains that research now shows that if you repeat a behaviour for 13 weeks, it’s yours for life. It’s a heck of a lot longer than the 21 days I always thought it took, but now at least I understand why my good intentions always fizzled out after those first 21 days.

Action steps to change your habits
So what are the tips to make sure you follow through for 13 weeks?

• Choose to focus on one new habit at a time. Don’t water down your efforts by trying to achieve everything at once.
• Put reminders everywhere - post-it-notes on your PC, reminders on your cell, notes on the fridge, etc.
• Ask a colleague to remind you every day and keep you accountable for following through.

“The individual who wants to reach the top in business must appreciate the might and force of habit. He must be quick to break those habits that can break him - and hasten to adopt those practices that will become the habits that will help him achieve the success he desires.” - J. Paul Getty (Widely regarded as the richest man in the world by the late 1950s.)

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