Hab·it /ˈhabət/
noun
- a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up.
Do you have bad habits that keep you from achieving your goals? What this definition doesn’t explain at all is how hard it is to change most habits.
For me, I have found that once I identify a habit in which I know I want to change but am struggling with I try instead to focus on the new habit I wish to create. With my weight I identified that my addiction to Mountain Dew was a very difficult habit to break. Instead of focusing on not drinking Mountain Dew, I instead focused on drinking Sprite. I then started focusing my efforts on creating a habit of drinking more water and coffee. Focusing on the new habit was like focusing on the positive and ignoring the negative and has worked much better for me.
In order to curb my bad habit of spending too much time on Facebook I created new habits. I started tracking my time more diligently and one of the things I do is to complete a report each week of how much time I spend doing multiple different things. One of those is Facebook! Seeing those numbers each week motivates me to lower them but it’s the habit of tracking my time and creating this report that enables me to do it.
Another big part of this is accountability. I learned that when I wasn’t willing to share openly with people what I was trying to accomplish it was because I hadn’t truly committed to it. I mean, if I tell people and ask them to hold me accountable, they are going to know if I fail. Exactly! Another habit I have created for myself is to surround myself with like-minded peers, share my goals with them and ask them to help me. I want and appreciate when they push me to follow through.