All you spontaneous types, listen up. If you want to have more energy, or get more focus, or be strategic not reactive, it won’t just happen. You have to plan better habits if you want to see change.
Obviously, we do many things in life by habit, good or bad. I may have a bad habit of adding one more task before I leave the house and end up leaving late more times than not. When I plan to leave 10 minutes earlier, then adding one more task might not make me late. On the other hand, I could stop myself doing one more thing, but I’ve tried and failed at that so many times, I’m striking that from the list. Knowing myself, I do better setting an earlier leaving time.
So what is it that you need to put in place to achieve more success and feel happier about your day? For many of the people I coach, blocking out time for their own projects, or strategic thinking time is the highest value new habit they could adopt. 2-3 times each week have an appointment on your calendar with yourself for at least 1.5 hours. That would be during regular working hours….not after every other possible interruption gets handled and you have no energy or creativity left. Imagine actually getting ahead of things and not being in reactive mode all the time.
Self shaming is not an effective habit either. It takes so much extra energy to “should” ourselves into reaching goals. I appreciate the concept of giving things up, for lent as an example. But, it is much harder than replacing a bad habit with a good one. If you can be satisfied with one piece of chocolate for dessert, then buying a bunch of Trader Joe’s dark chocolate peanut butter cups and having just one may replace 3 chocolate chip cookies which are amazingly yummy, but many more calories.
So what good habit can you plan this week? If it is really good, it will be as automatic as brushing your teeth. No effort, right?
Image courtesy of https://www.muhealth.org/our-stories