Successful people aren’t born that way. They become successful by establishing the habit of doing things unsuccessful people don’t like to do. The successful people don’t always like doing these things themselves; they just get on and do them.
—DON MARQUIS
Motivation is what gets you started.
Habit is what keeps you going.
—JIM ROHN
It’s been said that our quality of life is created by the quality of our habits. If a person is living a successful life, then that person simply has the habits in place that are creating and sustaining their levels of success. On the other hand, if someone is not experiencing the levels of success they want—no matter what the area—they simply haven’t committed to putting the necessary habits in place which will create the results they want.
Considering that our habits create our life, there is arguably no single skill that is more important for you to learn and master than controlling your habits. You must identify, implement, and maintain the habits necessary for creating the results you want in your life, while learning how to let go of any negative habits which are holding you back from achieving your true potential.
Habits are behaviors that are repeated regularly and tend to occur subconsciously. Whether you realize it or not, your life has been, and will continue to be, created by your habits. If you don’t control your habits, your habits will control you.
Unfortunately, if you’re like the rest of us, you were never taught how to successfully implement and sustain (aka “master”) positive habits. There’s no class offered in school called Habit Mastery. There should be. Such a course would probably be more important to your success and overall quality of life than all of the other courses combined.
Because they never learned to master their habits, most people fail at virtually every attempt to control them, time and time again. Take New Year’s Resolutions, for example.
Every year, millions of well-intentioned people make New Year’s resolutions, but less than five percent of us stick to them. A NYR is really just a positive habit (like exercising or early rising) you want to incorporate into your life, or a negative habit (like smoking or eating fast food) you want to get rid of. You don’t need a statistic to tell you that, when it comes to NYRs, most people have already given up and thrown in the towel before January has even come to a close.
Maybe you’ve seen this phenomenon in real time. If you’ve ever gone to the gym the first week of January, you know how difficult it can be to find a parking spot. It’s packed with vehicles owned by people with good intentions, and armed with a NYR to lose weight and get in shape. However, if you go back to the gym closer to the end of the month, you’ll notice that half of the parking lot is empty. Not armed with a proven strategy to stick with their new habits, the majority continue to fail.
Why is it so difficult to implement and sustain the habits we need to be happy, healthy, and successful?
Yes, we are, at some level, addicted to our habits. Whether psychologically or physically, once a habit has been reinforced through enough repetition, it can be very difficult to change. That is, if you don’t have an effective, proven strategy.
One of the primary reasons most people fail to create and sustain new habits is because they don’t know what to expect, and they don’t have a winning strategy.
Depending on the article you read or which expert you listen to, you’ll hear compelling evidence that it takes anywhere from a single hypnosis session, 21 days, or even up to three months to incorporate a new habit into your life—or get rid of an old one.
The popular 21-day myth may come from the 1960 book Psycho-Cybernetics: A New Way To Get More Living Out of Life. Written by cosmetic surgeon Dr. Maxwell Maltz, he found that amputees took, on average, 21 days to adjust to the loss of a limb. He argued that people take 21 days to adjust to any major life changes. Some would argue that how long it takes for a habit to become truly automatic also depends on the difficulty of the habit.
My personal experience and the real-world results I’ve seen working with hundreds of coaching clients has led me to the conclusion that you can change any habit in 30 days, if you have the right strategy. The problem is, most people don’t have any strategy, let alone the right one. So, year after year, they lose confidence in themselves and their ability to improve, as failed attempt after failed attempt piles up and knocks them down. Something has to change.
How can you become a master of your habits? How can you take complete control of your life—and your future—by learning how to identify, implement, and sustain any positive habit you want, and permanently remove any negative habit? You’re about to learn the right strategy, one most people know nothing about.