What decides whether the time and energy you put into building your habit is going to be worth it or not? The answer is, choosing the right habit and the best approach suited to you…the one that fits you perfectly.
The right habit
And choosing the right habit means choosing one that adds a definite value to your life and also that you believe in the importance of that value to you. Because when you buy into the why of anything, believe something is going to change your life for the better, make it easier, we have got ourselves an inbuilt source of motivation.
So, before building your habit, make sure you know clearly what it’s going to do for you, or better still, what will your life look like if you don’t build this habit. It helps us know our conviction level for that habit, show how truly involved are we with that choice.
The best approach
The best approach means choosing a style that works for you.
Let’s for example, take the most trending success habit – reading daily. Now, we all have different learning styles. Broadly speaking, there are 4 learning styles – visual, auditory, reading/writing, or kinesthetic. And you might prefer a different combination of these while I might learn better with a different combination.
Like, I learn better reading about things, but am able to retain the information better if it has been presented visually through pictures and diagrams. So, I would be better able to stick to the habit of reading a book per week rather than finishing an audiobook per week because that learning style doesn’t suit me.
Managing motivation when building your habit
Now, because building your habit requires consistency, to get over the problem of fluctuating motivation, use the habit stacking plus temptation building formula from the book Atomic Habits written by James Clear. I’ve found that it works really well because it gets you doing the things you need to by leveraging the things that you want to do.
20 Best Habits to choose from when Building Your Habit
Now, about 40% of what we do every day are habits like brushing teeth, or drinking that same type of coffee every morning. And so whether we realize it or not, they set the tone of our life…reflect our approach to life.
10 Best Thinking habits
Now, doing certain things make us feel excited instantly and other things can make us take a step back or find ways to get out of it. That’s because we automatically think of them as being good or bad. Thinking habits are about keeping those automatic thoughts that help us and changing the ones which aren’t helping us in a good way. It’s like spring cleaning in a sense.
1. Habit of prioritizing
Getting into the habit of working on things according to their priority for us is one of the key ways to manage time effectively. The idea is to lean into a more decluttered and organized approach in whatever we do. Being efficient and productive, achieving our goals can be as simple as getting done whatever’s on our daily to-do list, given that that list is based on the solid foundation of insight, effective planning, and the right approach.
2. Habit of auditing who's in your life
We tend to reflect certain qualities of the people we spend most of our time with. This is in a large part because of what’s called the Asch Paradigm – a study showing how individuals respond to group-think, and how much we conform because of social pressure. We gain from the collective knowledge and get inspired by the tenacity of others. But the opposite also holds true. According to a study done by the Biological and Clinical Psychology at Friedrich Schiller University, our brain reacts with a strong stress response when it has to deal with toxic behavior from people.
3. Maintaining healthy boundaries
One of the most effective success habits is respecting boundaries – knowing clearly what you are and aren’t ready to accept, and using that as a yardstick to make your commitments. And knowing clearly if and how much you are willing to stretch those boundaries is super important if you want to keep working on the things we believe in and not stress out over the things that don’t add value to our life.
4. Staying curious
Steve Jobs once took a calligraphy course in college just because it was something he didn’t know much about and was curious about it. But years later it sprouted the idea of stylized fonts on computer – the ones that we take granted for on our phones, tabs, and any kind of laptop or desktop.
Staying open to know about a variety of topics widens the library of information, which our conscious or subconscious mind can draw from when coming up with creative solutions to problems. Because coming up with creative ideas is essentially about connecting existing information in unusual ways. When building your habit to stay curious, the idea is to make it a natural part of our personality.
Watch the video up top for the other 6 thinking habits. The sixth one is a really powerful habit that uplevels how we approach life.
10 Best doing habits
Making intentional choices with our time, how we spend our mental energy, attention, focus is very important because it decides which direction our life takes. That’s why building your habit aligned with what you want from life, your values, is important.
11. Habit of working smart
Working hard is a very good quality, no doubts about that. But it’s better to start working smart when we want to stay consistent, motivated to push through to the end. Working smart is the habit of finding what ties in with our priorities or what’s important for us, and what we can find shortcuts for without affecting the outcome much – shortcuts that are time and energy savers.
An effective way to get into the working smart habit is to use Stephen Covey’s four quadrant matrix for time management.
12. Habit of making better decisions
The trick is to have a technique in place that helps us make the best decisions we can make. Like, legendary investor and philanthropist Warren Buffett who makes it a point to know everything about the company – it’s management, it’s future plans, the public sentiment about it, and much much more before he decides to buy its shares. And he is called the Oracle of Omaha because he rarely ever misses the mark.
One great technique to use this idea in our life is to adapt the Six Hats technique.
13. Habit of staying organized
Whether it’s a clutter-free work area, living area, or an efficiently managed to-do list, the habit of staying organized goes a long way in managing our time efficiently because it minimizes distraction. In fact, it’s a very good idea to set some time aside in your morning routine or night-time wind down routine to plan and organize your task for the day.
14. Monotasking
According to American Psychological Association, multitasking makes us less efficient because it fills our mind with too much activity. And the more complex these tasks are, the longer it takes our brain to shift gears. So, to declutter your mind, replace the habit of multitasking with the habit of focusing on and finishing one task before moving on to the next. This also helps us focus better because of what’s known as the Zeigarnik Effect.
Watch the video up top for the other 6 doing habits. The tenth one is a habit that’s essential to create and enjoy the kind of life we want.
The hardest part about change, whether it’s changing how you do something, building your habit, or changing where you live, who you talk to….the hardest part about change is the discomfort of not making the same automatic choices that you did before. But if we don’t change what we do, we will never be able to change the results that we get.
