Habits

Why Are Good Habits So Important?

A habit can be the difference between being successful at your job or not good at all. It can mean being overweight or healthy. It can mean thriving in a relationship with your partner or turning it into misery. Habits play a key role in people’s lives. Unfortunately, most people are strengthening the wrong ones, hence having bad results in many aspects of their lives.

Well, but there is good news. Habits can be easy to implement if you take the right effort and don’t give up in the first attempts.

The Power Of Habit

I will try to explain the power that a habit can have by talking about a book I read: The Power of Habit, written by Charles Duhigg.

He gave an example that I’ll never forget. It had a great impact on me and I hope it’ll also have on you.

One of the first chapters started with a story of a man who had amnesia. He was in an advanced stage where he couldn’t remember his family members nor relevant events from the past.

Surprisingly, this man seemed to not have forgotten his daily routines. Each and every morning he went to prepare his breakfast with bacon and eggs. After, he went for a walk around the house and came back home, alone.

You may ask: how could he have daily routines if he had amnesia? That’s the interesting part and the lesson that I want to pass you guys.

According to this book, the scientists have found out that the part of the brain which holds our memory is different from the part of the brain which holds our routines.

This means that if you decide to repeatedly repeat (sorry about the redundancy here) good habits, soon you will be doing them without thinking. And good habits, lead to a better life and eventually, to success (whatever that is).

7 Habits Of Highly Effective People

This book represents the habits I believe most people and enterprises should have in order to have the right mindset to succeed in life. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People was written by Stephen R. Covey

Be Proactive

When a new problem arises, try to be proactive rather than reactive. Have you ever thought about your past reactive attitudes towards someone or something? Did that feeling of being angry or anxious helped you make a point or feel better about yourself? Probably not.

Instead, if you still don’t, try to adopt a proactive manner. There’s always something you can do to solve a problem. The time you would be wasting getting mad or desperate, you could and should be investing in thinking about new strategies or approaches towards your goals.

Begin With The End In Mind

There’s nothing more powerful than to know exactly what you want to accomplish before you even started. It is called a vision. And it is what differentiate bosses from leaders. A leader makes other people believe the same and work toward the same objective.

If you don’t know what you’re driven by, anything you do or create can be in vain. You can have the luck to eventually do the thing you’re passionate about. But what if you’re always in the wrong path? Time is limited, let’s be effective not wasting it.

Put First Things First

A lot of people spend time on things that don’t matter and then complain they can’t accomplish anything. Gettings things done is, in fact, easy if you learn how to manage your time and your priorities.

The urgent and important tasks are something you can’t really run from. The problematic ones are the tasks that may seem urgent and important but in fact, aren’t.

We all know it can be hard to not answer a call or to see the news feed of your Instagram account. But is it really worth it?

If you start spending more time on Quadrant II, you’ll see great improvements in your life. Is by working on important tasks that are not urgent, that people learn the most IF done on a constant basis. Be patient, and results will eventually appear. I promise you.

Think Win-Win

Maybe you’ve already noticed that most people tend to fight for a win/lose or lose/win situation. They seem to deny the existence of a win-win situation. Or they simply are greedy and want more for themselves, and then end up earning nothing.

There are even situations when someone prefers to be sad and inflict pain in another rather than changing their mindset to a happy one. This self-destructive approach doesn’t benefit anyone.

According to Stephen R. Covey and its books sources, there’s always a third alternative: to Think Win-Win. Everyone will be happy and both parties had worked in a proactive manner.

Seek First To Understand, Then To Be Understood

You much likely know people that don’t let you talk, so to speak. They just want to be listened to. But is that the way to create empathy with others? I don’t think so.

If you’ll never really try to understand what the person in front of you is trying to transmit, that person will never feel really accepted or understood. It is by truly listening to what a person has to say that we can learn more effectively and help in a more empathic way.

By doing that, not only are you empowering the bonds among each other, but also creating good habits in a relationship.

Synergize

The implementation of all the other habits will create synergy: two persons with similar approaches to life will have better and stronger results. We all have to win by knowing what great habits can bring. So let’s not be selfish and enlight other people’s life by helping them in the way we can.

Sharpen The Saw

All the theory is beautiful but if you’re not feeling good with yourself it will be much harder to implement anything at all.

The last but not least habit is to know that you must treat your body and soul well. You should create healthy habits like eating well, doing sports on a regular basis (daily would be the ideal), have enough hours of sleeping, etc.

What’s the sense of knowing how to be a better version of yourself if you can’t put what you’ve learned into practice? My advice to you is: work hard and take the right mindset.

Books

Read the list of books that are helping me achieve financial freedom by clicking here.