
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. |