How To Develop Good Habits Automatically — Habit Doctor — Purushothaman
Do You Have a Huge Goal You’d Like to Accomplish? This may include losing weight, starting a relationship, getting out of debt, or developing your spiritual life.
If it’s an enormous goal, it’ll likely require consistent action on a day-to-day basis to ascertain whether the goal is achieved.
For example, to realize the goal of losing weight, you would need to eat healthy food daily and exercise CONSISTENTLY to successfully reach your goal weight. Regardless of how great the diet is, if you don’t stick with it, it won’t work. Similarly, for the goal of running a marathon, you need to train yourself over months before you’ll realize your goal.
As Aristotle puts it, we are what we repeatedly do. Therefore to become excellent in any area requires much more than just a one-time act. Remaining ‘consistent’ is where the matter occurs for many folks. We follow our diet for one or two days, on the other hand, we lose focus, get distracted or some unexpected event occurs to throw us astray.
Chances are, we were counting on motivation and willpower to assist us to achieve our goals which unfortunately are very limited resources. a nasty night’s sleep, an argument with our spouse, or a stressful day at work are often all that’s needed to throw us astray and fall into old destructive habits.
INSTEAD of counting on willpower and motivation to realize our goals, we’d like to specialize in developing HABITS that will lead us to our goals ‘automatically’.
By their nature, habits are behavior that’s ‘frequently repeated’ and sometimes ‘unconscious’.
Unconscious means we need not believe or motivate ourselves to require an action — we roll in the hay automatically. For instance, you do not need to motivate yourself to wash your teeth every day — you do it automatically. Driving is an automatic action as is walking, talking, chewing our food, etc. You don’t consciously think about the way you talk, you only roll in the hay.
You will find that anyone who has achieved an enormous goal has had to develop new HABITS and become a better PERSON to realize their goal.
For example, if your goal is to reduce weight, you’ll need to develop new habits like healthy eating and regular exercise. Once you’ve developed these as ‘habits’ though, the achievement of your goal is virtually guaranteed. By taking small consistent actions over time, you achieve your goals ‘automatically’ by developing good habits. You BECOME a healthy, fit person.
Another advantage of developing good habits is that they’re largely PERMANENT. you’ll thereby avoid the pitfalls of fad or ‘crash’ diets that can’t be sustained over the future and as a result, people fall back to old habits and regain all the weight that was lost.
So if you’ve got an enormous goal you would like to fulfill but in the past have lacked willpower, motivation, and drive to form it into reality, specialize in developing great habits instead. you’ll conserve energy and put
your goals on ‘autopilot’. If you want to write down a book, develop the habit of writing for an hour every day. If you would like to run a marathon, run every day.
Determine what small consistent actions are required to reach your goal and switch these into habits.
Get in touch with Living In Wellbeing and we can help you find your passions and goals and help you find measures to achieve them.
Author: Dr. Purushothaman
Originally published at https://www.habitsdoctor.com on June 26, 2020.
