Habits determine performance

Habits, good or bad, make you who you are. Your success is directly determined by your habits. Stronger and longer the list of good habits the more successful you can be. Hence choice of habits determines your quality of performance. So the extent of habits and their quality makes a man or woman.

Habits are performed unconsciously. A good thing about good habits is that they free us to concentrate on developing new skills. In other words, the more good habits we perform automatically or with little effort frees up more time to take on new things for continuous development.

We often operate like machines; this is both good and bad but we hardly have a choice. From the time you wake up in the morning till you go to sleep at night there are many daily routines and some are done subconsciously or with minimum effort; most of these daily actions are habit driven.

Whether you are employed, self-employed or unemployed, you need good habits to improve your life situation. This is because nobody can force you to excel; external forces can only help you achieve the bare minimum. If you want to do better than this, you need to acquire, inculcate and practise good habits.

Be aware of losses due to bad habits

Since you perform them automatically or without much thinking, you'll first have to bring them into your consciousness before you can change them. You must become aware of your habits. What is this habit really? How is this bad habit or collection of bad habits affecting me? How is this habit affecting others? What do I gain if I change?

Breaking inherent or acquired bad habits and natural tendencies demands extraordinary mind power to take better control of your life for personal development.

The loss you suffer due to bad habits may be huge and if you assess this in a scientific manner you will be surprised. You must make a decision today that "no matter what" I will change my bad habits. You must convince yourself that the change in habit is worth the effort involved and its only then will you have the desire to change.

Replacing bad habits

You need to form new habits. Replace bad ones with good ones. You develop good habits in the same manner that you've already developed bad ones; mainly, by repetition. What is it that you will repeat - and also why?

There are many habits good and bad embedded into work life. The good habits qualify as productive, effective and conducive to one's ability to get work done.

Other less positive habits also exist. Negative behavior can impact your performance, image and relationships with others.

Learning how to cultivate the skills to channel energy towards positive rather than negative behavior is a tremendous talent to have.

Good habits are hard to develop

Good habits are hard to develop but easy to live with and bad habits are easy to develop but hard to live with. You may recognise that to successfully manage habit changes, breaking bad habits is necessary to develop new ones. It is important to focus on changing one habit at a time. Take consistent daily action to break the bad habit that has been causing problems and take the action to develop a new one.

I suggest doing this process one step at a time rather than trying to do it all at once.

Deeply imbedded habits cannot be changed overnight.

There will be times when you question whether it is all worth it. You'll say to yourself that breaking these bad habits is too difficult; that you are too weak to change. Get support from others, especially people who want to make changes in their lives and read about people who have been successful in breaking bad habits.

Practice is the only way to internalise good habits

The key to developing good habits is to practice good habits; if you practice a little every day, you will eventually internalise the skills you need and habits will become second nature. Acquiring and developing habits is a life skill.

Knowledge, skills and practice form competencies. And each habit is a competence and you know what competence can do for you. Make collecting and internalising good habits, a habit.