Have you ever asked yourself these types of questions: “Can habits change your life?” or “What are the benefits of good habits?”
If you are like most success hungry entrepreneurs, then I guess the answer is a resounding “Yes!” We all want to be more successful and developing positive habits can help us to achieve that success.
So, why are habits important to your success in life?
If these highflyers are using the power of habits, don’t you think you should do too?
Of course you should! Habits give you structure and can help you to keep going when things get tough. They can become so ingrained that nothing will stop you from completing certain habits.
That being said, it is pretty obvious that you need to create simple, daily habits that will impact you positively. And if you have any negative habits, you need to recognise them and eliminate them from your life.
But what exactly is a habit? Well, a habit is something you do daily without thinking much about it. You probably have a habit of waking at a certain time, brushing your teeth a certain way, and perhaps calling your parents once a week on a Thursday evening.
And the good news is that you can change your habits or create new ones. It must be said that it can be very difficult to break old habits, especially if you have been doing them for years, but if they aren’t doing you any good, it is time to ditch them!
Good habits will help you to achieve more in life and to reach your goals, so let’s look at building and stacking a daily routine that will fire you up and help you to achieve more in your life!
There are morning routines and evening routines that perhaps are habit-based already for you. You may get up, eat breakfast, shower, brush your teeth, and depending on how early you get up; exercise may be in the morning routine as well.
In creating daily routines, you identify what you already do that is good and then attach a tiny habit to it. For example, if you do a few minutes of yoga in the morning, you can stay on the mat and do five minutes of meditation. After that is complete, you can do four minutes of visualization, and to finish it up, do three minutes of deep breathing.
This is very similar to Tony Robbins’ 4-part morning routine, which is four tiny habits, one right after the other.
To create a habit-stacking routine, Steve Scott advises that you look at your day and come up with times and locations as your prompts. It would like this:
– Once I wake up, I will…
– Once I start work, I will…
– Once I have a break or lunch, I will…
– Once my work is complete, I will…
– Once I finish dinner, I will…
– Once I hit the gym, I will…
– If I travel, I will…
These are examples and adjustable as not everyone goes to the gym or travels for work or vacation.
Make sure to have a good reason why you want to stack the habits you have picked out. A big why is essential for any habit or goal, or you will not put in the necessary time to do it.
Steve Scott believes that you should only work on one routine because of the willpower required to do it. It is easy to get distracted, and working on two or three routines at once, would require more focus and willpower than the average person can truly say they have.
As mentioned, Steve Scott came up with 97 tiny habits you can stack into different areas. He broke down the areas of your life to focus on like this:
– Leisure (Your days off and your vacation time)
– Organization (Keeping the house clean, organized, and decluttered, along with your workspace)
– Finances (Making and saving money. Reducing debt)
– Productivity (Finding your best working hours and getting tasks done on time)
– Spirituality (Connecting with the earth and your Creator)
– Health and Fitness (Your mental and physical well-being, including what you eat and how you exercise)
– Relationships (Developing loving relationships with family and friends. Getting along with co-workers)
Let’s look at a daily routine for relationships using habits stacking.
We will use the dinner hour as our example.
– When we prepare dinner, I will ask about their day.
– When we sit down to eat, I will say how grateful I am for not only the food but having them in my life
– During the dinner, I will put away my cell phone and focus on what they say
During clean-up, I will touch my partners’ lower back to make a physical and emotional connection.
– After dinner, I will take their hand, and we will walk around the block while I express my love
Creating habits requires self-discipline and many people do lack in this area. If you want to gain more self-discipline, check out the featured resource below where you can get a free report about the Power Of Self-Discipline; download, read it and take action 😊
You may have heard before that some people use meditation to increase their focus and to help them clear their minds. This is true, it does work well for a lot of people.
However, if you’re trying to do something specific with your focus or creativity, you probably won’t benefit as much from a random generic meditation class. You may need something a little more purposeful or specific to assist the creative process!
You shouldn’t be thinking about anything whatsoever during it, allowing your mind to go entirely blank. This helps people destress and relax, because they’re not thinking about all the things they have to worry about.
However, while this is helpful for that, it might not be as conducive to helping you focus or figure out a project. You should instead try more purposeful meditation, where instead of having your mind go blank, you focus on one thing and one thing only.
By clearing your mind of all other distractions, except for the project at hand, you’re going to be able to completely focus on that and come up with much better solutions.
Ideally, this would be accomplished in a space where you’re free of any noises, obnoxious sights, or people trying to get your attention.
There aren’t many places that would fit this bill perfectly, so just work with what you’ve got. The most important thing should be to not have people interrupting you, so if you can get to a space like that, even if it does have errant sounds and sights, you should still be able to focus well.
You might end up finding that different things help you more or less while you’re meditating. Try experimenting a little bit. You might not be able to focus in dead silence, so you might have some ambient nature sounds playing through some headphones.
You might want the lights up or down, and you might want to keep your eyes open or closed. It’s different for everyone, so try a little bit of everything at first to see what helps.
For most people, this is worth a try, but don’t be upset if it doesn’t work for you. A handful of people don’t focus well under meditation conditions, so you might find it’s simply not right for you. At least with a purposeful meditation, you have something to focus on (your task) rather than just trying to clear your mind which can be very difficult for some people. Give it a try; what have you got to lose?
Unless you’re particularly lucky or skilled, creative ideas probably don’t just happen on demand for you. In fact, in most cases, creativity will appear whenever it happens to, and you tend to have very little control over when it will occur.
The purposeful meditation techniques described above may help you to get yourself into creative flow so may be worth a shot.
Otherwise, creativity can come up and interrupt you at any moment, even if you’re in the middle of something important. You could be trying to focus on your normal work, trying to sleep, or in the middle of a call or meeting with someone very important.
In these cases, you have to treat it the same way you would a toddler. The first thing you should try to do is train yourself to reserve your creative thoughts for later.
If your mind wanders even a little while you’re trying to focus, you can get flooded with all these different ideas that you can get lost in.
Sometimes a creative idea will pop up that could be life changing for you, and in that case, you need to stop what you’re doing and at least write it down quickly. Don’t ignore your creativity outright if it’s something that’s a really good idea or something that you really want to work on.
If that’s the case, try to come back to it later and continue expanding on it. You just can’t let random intrusive thoughts take over your work. Focus can be extremely important while also being rather fragile.
The slightest wandering thought or break in your concentration can pull you way off track in some instances. While some people’s focus isn’t easily broken, yours might be one little distraction away from crumbling, allowing you to get fully enveloped in that distraction.
As you can appreciate, all of this purposeful meditation, creativity process and maintaining focus can take a lot of self-discipline and a positive attitude. If you don’t have this, you will probably struggle to maintain any focus and creativity, so it is well worth your while to adopt the correct mindset; I know this may sound a little cliched, but it does really work.
If you want to develop more self-discipline, click on the featured resource below to get a free report, The Power Of Self-Discipline; download, read it and take action 😊
People want to make money. You see the lavish lifestyles of celebrities and other famous people and wish you could have the same lifestyle yourself. But is your drive for money blinding you to what is truly important in your life? And, what is money mindset?
It is often said that if you do something you love, the money will follow. There seems to be something to this because you will approach whatever you love with passion. You’ll get better at it to the point where you are better than everyone else, or at least that is what you strive.
You may be successful in the short term of getting that extra dollar from a new job or squeezing a quick buck from your business. But you will constantly be in search for more money.
You could even put yourself into a position where you can’t handle the new job because you lack the necessary experience. In other words, you didn’t give your previous level enough time to develop a foundation. You jumped ahead, and now you are unclear what to do. It’s a concept known as the Peter Principle, named after the person who came up with the idea, Peter Drucker.
Money isn’t as important as many try to make it out to be. For instance, what good is having a high-paying job when you have to work 80-90 hours a week? What kind of life is that?
Many people who do this, look back at their lives and wonder why they did it. While they may have a lot of money when they get older, they likely don’t have anyone to share it with. Another possibility is the heavy workload to obtain that wealth gets them to an early grave. The money they earned is useless to them if that happens.
And having a good work-life balance is becoming increasingly important for people; this is why more and more of us are looking at ways to make money online.
If you can find a way to make money from home you can have a great work-life balance, but it isn’t for everyone. There are many distractions around the home, and you need to be laser focused on your work or your productivity will drop like a stone.
This is why mindset is so important in everything you do and having a money mindset is no different.
Anyone can make money. You can post an offer in your supermarket for services you are willing to provide. You can post offers on Craigslist to sell your services. You can sell old merchandise on eBay and other online sellers. You can get a part time job. There are many other ways people can make money. The question is, why do you even need a money mindset if making money is easy?
While the dynamics of making money may be easy, if you are not taking the right steps, you won’t be making enough for it to be worthwhile. You not only want to optimize your money-making abilities, but you also want to keep the money that you do make.
You need to focus your efforts on opportunities that will give you the highest return. Most people aren’t taught how to do this. They learn it by trial-and-error. Which means, they will likely do the wrong things that will cost them a lot of money.
That money took a long time to make. As people age, they have less time to recoup the losses. It’s also tougher to get jobs when you get older. Companies would rather pay a younger person a lot less money even if they need to be trained.
Learning about the right approaches to money management can counter all of these problems. You can still use the methods discussed in the first paragraph to earn money for yourself, but you want to take that money and get them earning more for you.
Some people will strike it lucky. They will win the lottery, or they create an app that sells for millions of dollars. Can you depend on either of these? Are you going to come into money from a long-lost relative who passed away? Again, this is not something you should count on (unless you know for sure).
The biggest problem for them is all the relatives and friends that suddenly come into the picture. Also, spouses have differences of opinion on how this money should be spent.
However you spend your money, you need to ensure you don’t spend more than you have! Let’s look at that next.
Living within your means is not as difficult as most people make it out to be. It takes some discipline, but it can be well worth the effort. At the very least, you will be able to sleep at night knowing you aren’t burdened with a heavy debt load.
If you have struggled with debt before, especially credit card debt, consider cutting up those cards and canceling the accounts. This is the surest way to make sure you don’t get yourself into trouble with spending more than you make.
Don’t try to keep up with the Joneses. Just because your neighbor is driving a new sports car and is always buying the latest and greatest gadgets, doesn’t mean you need to follow along. What many people don’t realize is that those neighbors are not living within their means. They will eventually run into trouble as they have the wrong money mindset.
If you happen to be straddled with a lot of debt, consider consolidating all of it into one lower payment. The interest on credit cards can be wicked and makes it almost impossible for most people to get out of the situation.
If you cannot obtain a consolidation loan, consider hitting up your family for the loan. This is not ideal as it can cause tension in the family. But, it is better than having huge interest charges added to your balance each and every month. As long as you show your family members a willingness to pay them back consistently, you shouldn’t run into too many problems. Do make an effort to pay them back quickly, however.
You still need to live, and that may require purchasing higher end appliances when the old ones break down. This is why you should always set aside some cash each month as an emergency fund. Try to accumulate six months worth of cash for this.
For high ticket items that aren’t needed right away, consider using layaway plans. Many retailers have brought this feature back, knowing that people are overextended with consumer debt.
If you are struggling, do you think can you change your financial circumstances with the correct mindset? I hope you said “Yes!”
If you look at the profiles of wealthy people, you will find they have a different mindset than others. They know the value of money, and they know the fundamental factors of how to make their money grow. If you are not yet wealthy and feel you are struggling, take some tips from these wealthy people.
An age-old idiom of money is to use compound interest in your favor. Benjamin Franklin was a big proponent of this principle. He was quite wealthy for his time, so it is likely he knew what he was talking about.
But, it makes sense. If your money grows on its own, and the money that you earn ends up growing as well, it’s only a matter of time when this amounts to a decent sum of money. And if you keep adding to the balance, that money will also grow along with it.
The situation is a bit more complicated today with government taxing the growth of money. But, you can invest in an IRA or 401K and have that tax deferred until some future period.
Another principle wealthy people adhere to is creating multiple income streams. The more income streams you have working for you, the quicker you will become wealthy. When you have multiple income streams, pump up the ones that are working well and dump the ones that aren’t.
After you are financially well off, make sure you never touch the principal. Set up your principal so that it earns the most it can earn and live only within the means of the earnings on that money. If possible, add to the principal with as much of the earnings as you can afford, so that the principal grows. Just never tap into it. If you find any shortfalls, consider taking on some temporary work. Once the principal is gone, it’s gone for good.
The final tip is to stay out of debt as much as possible. The debt will drain your savings and your portfolio. There can be smart uses of debt as long as the result of using that debt brings in more money than the debt itself. But most debt should be avoided to keep your financial outlook stable.
Doing all this money management may seem a little daunting, but you don’t have to do it alone; this is where a financial advisor comes in…
Choosing someone to manage your finances for you is a big step. Who do you trust and how good are they? If you are lucky to find the right financial advisor, will it help develop your money mindset?
The advantage of having an advisor is they are not emotionally attached to your money. The disadvantage is they are not emotionally attached to your money. It is a double-edged sword and one that you have to monitor very carefully. Too many people make the mistake of keeping an advisor employed even when they are not doing as well as expected.
This brings up an important point. You are ultimately responsible for the decisions made by any advisor you choose. While they may not be good and end up losing money on your account, you chose them, to begin with. This is why it’s crucial to pick a good advisor. Try to find people you trust who are happy with advisors they have used. Referrals from people you know are the best type of referrals.
When using a financial advisor, be careful not to remove yourself from the process. This is common and should be avoided. If this does happen, then you won’t be adopting a money mindset by using an advisor. You need to hold them accountable which means you need to know what they are doing.
On the other hand, you don’t want to micromanage your financial advisor. Good advisors are well trained and know the ins and outs of managing money. If you are constantly calling them to find out why a particular stock or bond is not doing as expected, you are not being fair to your advisor.
Of course, if they set up the plan with one expectation for your entire portfolio and it is not doing what you agreed upon, you need to be critical with the advisor.
Having the correct money mindset requires great self-discipline and many people struggle with this so if you want to harness the power of self-discipline, check out the featured resource below for a free report; download, read it and take action 🙂
Life throws challenges at us daily, and in the increasingly hectic pace of life, you need to work on positivity. This doesn’t mean you have to spend all day reading a self-help book.
Instead, you can use tiny habits daily to build up your positive mindset.
Being positive may sound a little esoteric and you may think, “How can this make my life better/make me more successful…?” but the way you think has an enormous impact on how you view and live life and this in turn will definitely have an impact on how successful you are.
And you will also tend to attract similar people to you which helps to reinforce your positive attitude; people who will support you and pick you up when you fall down. Whereas negative people delight in pointing out your faults to make themselves feel better.
So, are you now beginning to appreciate the power of having a positive mindset?
If the answer is yes, here are seven simple habits you can start with today to boost your positivity.
Words and how you use them are essential to your mental well-being and the ability to stay positive.
Frequently throughout the day, you need to monitor if a negative thought comes into your head or you actually state something negative about yourself.
For example, if you are saying to yourself, “I’ve studied for two hours and still don’t get it, maybe I am not smart enough,” you need to rephrase that. Try saying, “I will change the way I study and come at this when I am fresh. It may take a bit longer, but I can do this.”
When you find yourself being very negative all day, it is helpful to write down what you said and go back to see why you would say that. Then look for ways to change that phrasing to a positive and keep working on it.
People will make mistakes, and sometimes it is too easy to be critical of them.
Think about how you can approach this and give them a solution at the same time. We all need teamwork, whether it is family or work situations.
Great coaches come with solutions rather than constant complaining.
Rejection is part of life. Everyone gets rejected multiple times during their life. Adopt the belief that rejection is a chance to learn and grow.
An author who has never been rejected is scarce. In fact, even the most prolific authors were rejected multiple times in their careers.
Fear of failure is normally a fear of rejection and can be a real hurdle to overcome, so by thinking of them as opportunities to grow rather than insurmountable obstacles will help you a lot.
The poison arrows of rejection, stress, and depression will always try to pierce your heart. You must deflect these negative issues as much as possible.
When you pause and consider all the great things in your life (and everybody has a lot to be thankful for), the negative loses much of its power over you. Write down everything you are grateful for, no matter how small it is.
Try asking yourself a few powerful questions in the morning to put you in a positive state.
For example: “What am I most happy about in my life right now? What about that makes me happy? How does that make me feel?”
Or “What am I really excited about in my life right now? What about that/why does that make me feel excited? How does that make me feel?”
Thinks how great answering these questions can make you feel in the morning!
Even the act of waking up in the morning is something you should be thankful for as you have been granted another day to be the best you can be.
Bringing joy to others will rebound back to you. Just the simple act of smiling and seeing someone’s face light up from this simple gesture will fill you with positive feelings.
Try it today. When you walk past a stranger in the street, smile and say hello and see what reaction you get; it might just make your day. Simple but effective.
Too many people watch television and wish they had the life of the rich and famous.
Fame and fortune do not always account to happiness. Look at famous celebrities like Marilyn Monroe or John Belushi who were huge stars in their day but they both decided to take their own lives when they appeared to have everything; don’t be fooled by outward appearances!
Starting today, if you do not make your bed right after you wake up, begin this habit. It will give you a boost of satisfaction, and then you will be more apt to engage in cleaning up after yourself throughout the day.
Decluttering your space at home and work on a daily basis makes you feel great.
When you let things slide, you become anxious or stressed at the mess that has accumulated.
OK, so there are seven quick habits that you can use to boost your positivity today.
If you want to know more about developing a strong mindset, then check out the featured resource below where you can download a free report that will help do just that; download, read it and take action 😊
Life can be very stressful for any number of reasons. Some of them are self-inflicted, while others are out of your control.
Regardless of why life is stressful for you, you need to be able to block it out when it’s time to get to work, otherwise you’re going to be pulled away from the projects you need to do in order to make money.
You might go to just check the top headlines on any news site, and just continuously scroll through looking at all the bad news you can, which ends up making you more stressed and upset.
This is one of the more self-inflicted burdens. Much like being addicted to social media, people have found themselves addicted to reading the most upsetting headlines constantly, which just ends up being bad for them.
If this type of behavior is inhibiting you from working well, you need to tune out from the news for a little while and focus on work, especially during hours that you should be working.
There are tons of burdens which are either out of your control or only partially in your control, such as marriage problems and concerns with friends, which can also negatively affect you in work.
You have to understand that there is a time to work on these problems, which is outside of work. If your job stresses productivity as most jobs do, you’re not going to fare very well if you’re constantly distracted by problems outside of work.
For one, they can make you stressed out and have you on edge, which can negatively affect your work performance in many ways.
You can end up being more intimidating to clients and co-workers if the perceive you to be stressed out, and you can also end up working much slower if you’re distracted, leading you to have much worse performance.
If you’re getting poor performance reviews and losing clients due to being stressed out, you’re going to be adding on more stress to what you already have, due to the financial problems that come along with lower bonuses and less clients at work. It is difficult, but you have to leave the problems you have at home behind when you go to work.
One way to do this is to study decision making and there is a great book that can help you do just that. It is called Mental Models and I have done a quick review of the book below.
If you’re like most people, you can often make decisions based on the wrong input. The information that you get can fools you into thinking that you must handle something when it doesn’t need to be handled at the moment.
In the book, Mental Models, the author shares valuable lessons ranging from how to make better decisions to how to approach those decisions. Readers will also learn how to handle problem solving when the need arises.
The book opens with a chapter on decision making. The first part teaches readers the importance of focusing on the things that are important, rather than things that are urgent.
You’ll discover that urgent matters can sometimes masquerade as important but aren’t. These are things that you think you must take care of right away but it’s not true. Usually, these urgent matters come up as a result of other people acting like the matter is urgent.
Or you can prioritize a matter as urgent when you want to put off doing something else – something you should be doing. The author shares the “Eisenhower Matrix” with readers.
This is a system that divides tasks into important and unimportant. Then it takes those tasks and further divides them according to what’s urgent and what’s not. The system teaches you what you need to do right now, what tasks you should plan to do, what someone else can handle and what you can ignore completely.
Another chapter shares with readers the importance of being able to correctly see. This part talks about using the brain’s second system. This system is where slow and deliberate choices are made, unlike in system one of the brain, which often makes decisions without thinking things through.
An interesting chapter in the book focuses on avoiding things and how doing this can actually help you to succeed. The information shared in this chapter goes against the most common advice you might have heard.
For example, one directive is on avoiding to-do lists. Another part tells readers to avoid dealing with direct goals. While this advice is contrary to some popular advice, the information in the book is solid and can help you learn to improve your decision making.
If you want to become a powerful decision maker, his book is a great place to start. Check out Mental Models here.
As you can appreciate, all of this decision making and maintaining focus can take a lot of self-discipline and a positive attitude. If you don’t have this, you will probably struggle to maintain any focus and creativity, so it is well worth your while to adopt the correct mindset; I know this may sound a little cliched, but it does really work.
If you want to develop more self-discipline, click on the featured resource below to get a free report, The Power Of Self-Discipline; download, read it and take action 😊
