Good Habits Can Bring About Big Results
Building good habits is a common topic in coaching sessions. Ordinary people like you and me often come to coaching because they want to realise BIG results. You have ambition and vision and you want to succeed. But how can we get you there?
I have learnt a great deal about productivity and goal achievement over the years. I am proud to have achieved some of my own big ambitions including:
- A Ph.D. in neuroscience from Caltech – one of the best science universities in the world.
- Writing and publishing a book with the No1 UK publisher Wiley and Sons, Capstone.
- Setting up my own independent publishing label.
- Changing my career from laboratory research to social research and people development.
- Finding a partner I love.
- Starting and running my own business.
These were significant achievements for me – both in personal relationships and my personal development. They took time and dedication. However, the only massive action I took towards each one was deciding that this was something I wanted.
I decided that I wanted:
- A Ph.D. underpinned by pure curiosity and interest in something I found fascinating.
- To have my book published,
- To be creative and do what I love in a way I like doing it.
- To share my life with someone I admire and love.
- To support others with my knowledge and expertise.
- To build a team where other people felt fulfilled in their work.
Barriers to Finding Success and Achieving Goals
We all put up barriers to achieving our goals. There are many complex emotions involved in the stories we tell ourselves about success. Here are a few things that did not help me towards getting to my goals, maybe they sound familiar to you?
- Wanting to stay in school to avoid getting a job.
- Thinking it’s all been said before so why bother?
- Feeling I could not change my mind or I would disappoint others.
- Looking for “the one” and when they fail to be it, then next, and the next.
- Thinking I should not try because I lack investment, scale-up plans, and a roadmap.
The 14 Day Habit Builder is an online/self-taught course designed to help you:
- make a critical positive change
- learn to create habits that work for you!
- raise your motivation and confidence.
Good Habits Can Overcome Barriers
What helped me were good habits. These habits seemed incredibly small and insignificant at the time, yet proved highly effective in the me to long term.
The difference a good habit can make to any goal is massive! Performing small and positive actions regularly is far more effective than the occasional ‘big push’. In fact, having over ten years of coaching experience I would go as far as saying that doing a big push only makes sense if you already have a regular practice of small, positive habits.
Good Habits on a Daily Basis Bring Success
Whether you’ve got a specific goal or are aiming towards a general positive direction, it’s what you do on a daily basis that most determines your chances of success.
How come? Good habits compound your success. More on the details of how this works will be shared in another blog but as my coach says we don’t need to know the mechanics of refrigeration to know we should keep our milk cold.
How do we Embed these Small but Positive Habits into Our Lives?
Building on my expertise in neuroscience and learning from my own experience of achieving goals, I came up with a simple structure to promote good habits which I call the 14-day habit change challenge. Taking part in this challenge will bring immediate and positive action towards building new positive habits.
The small positive actions you take every day all build results and bring you closer to your goals. These actions might be:
- Setting daily goals and making to-do lists.
- Working on parts of your creative project one bite at a time.
- Delivering value to someone.
- Relating to people from your true heart centre.
- Serving the client(s) you have now.
It can appear deceiving because in the moment, such daily activities are hardly Herculean. They are quite ordinary. But consider this: Bring to mind 2-3 people you admire and notice their key habits. You will likely find they are exactly what you could be doing too. This is true even if your role models are:
- Nobel Prize winners.
- New York Times Bestselling authors.
- Industry movers and shakers.
- The couple celebrating their golden anniversary.
- The young millennial millionaire.
While luck certainly has its place in success, Louis Pasteur, French chemist and Nobel Prize recipient, wisely said: “Fortune favours the prepared mind.”
Good Habit Building Exercise
- Look back in time, maybe 3, 5 or 10 years and consider which habits, however small, helped you succeed in areas where you feel most proud of your achievements.
- Look over the last year, perhaps at 3, 6 and 12 months and examine your good habits over these periods. Notice how they connect with what you want to achieve now.
- You may also wish to look towards areas where you have not done as well as you wish, either in the last year or in the past. Notice whether you can pick up any clues about habits that are working against you.
To make time count we need to appreciate the value of good habits and learn to nurture them. Our 14-day challenge is a great exercise to try to help you learn more about yours so you can do more to live more.
Stay tuned for other e-mails, our monthly newsletter or visit my other blogs. Let’s create the life you want and bring out the best in you. And if you have questions or comments email me.
Further Reading to Promote Good Habit Building
Below you will find a number of books I highly recommend if you want to know more about habits.
- The Habit by Charles Duhigg – for coaches, consultants and those who really want to know more about the science of habits
- Atomic Habits by James Clear – for students of life with an overachiever gene
- Get Productive by me – for 36 practical activities that will boost your productivity without needing to read a whole book.