Change your habits, change your life!

Are your habits keeping you stuck?

We all want to thrive, personally and professionally. But all too often “life gets in the way,” or rather, we get in our own way. That’s because of our repetitive thought and behavioral patterns, our limiting habits. When we practice more empowering habits, that’s when we can more easily create the success and life we want.

So if you are currently not at the level of success and freedom you want, if your career is not advancing at the pace you want it to advance, if you’re not generating the desired income although you’re working really hard and “doing all the right things,” could it be that your current habits are keeping you stuck?

Have you been trying, trying, and trying,… but nothing’s shifting?

Has it been hard for you to create positive change? Have you tried to implement an empowering morning routine, but you just can't get yourself to doing it? Is it easier to find an excuse... every single morning? Or have you wanted to work out more consistently, but you just can’t find the time for it? Or should you be negotiating your salary, but you’re putting it off week after week… because it seems too hard?

If this is what you’re experiencing, then not only are you not making progress but you’re also destroying your self-esteem as you constantly disappoint yourself. Maybe you fall asleep with that thought of “tomorrow I surely…” only to let yourself (and others) down day after day, week after week…

Or maybe you know you should have a critical conversation with a co-worker, but he triggers you so much that you just can’t make yourself do it and you rather put up with a toxic work environment. You want to be emotionally intelligent but after the first two words you get triggered, and you slip into impatience as your colleague “just doesn’t get it?”

Or should you be advocating for yourself and be more visible in your organization, but you are so used to keeping your head down and waiting to be discovered that you don’t know how to empower yourself to create that career you’ve been dreaming of? How to finally stand up for yourself and hop on the driver’s seat of your career, take the steering wheel? Have you become a victim of convenience?

If you see yourself in any of these examples, then you may have become the servant – or even the prisoner – of your habits. And you may be struggling to free yourself of those habits that have turned into shackles… Thinking habits turn into thought patterns, and they usually go hand in hand with behavioral patterns. A lot of them are subconscious, or at least that’s how they are created… through programming. We condition ourselves to stay stuck in habits – without wanting it, but we still do it.

Want to get out of your self-constructed habit prison cell?

So if we want to get out of this self-constructed prison cell, we need to find a way to break our habits; replace them with more empowering ones. Replacing is key because habits don’t like a void. So if you want to get rid of a debilitating habit, make sure you find one that serves you better to fill that void right away.

Not saying it’s easy… The truth is, changing your habits may feel quite uncomfortable. It requires an incredible amount of discipline. It may even be freakin’ hard! It requires will power, or if you want to make it a bit easier, establishing a reward system. For example, you could decide to gift yourself a new gym outfit after your first five workouts. Or you invite yourself out to a nice dinner after you negotiated that new salary.

On the other hand, it's easy for your subconscious programming (which determines 95% of your behavior) to convince you that there's not enough time, you should stay in bed longer, you should check the news or your email or social media (and thus add stress to your day right away)... or whatever your excuse is to not engage in a healthier morning routine! Deep down, you know that this is not really an obligation. You know that you should be free to make a different choice. Nevertheless, you allow yourself to stay stuck. You hand your power over to your subconscious programming, which keeps you on auto-pilot.

And this continues as you move through your day: You know you "should" put your best foot forward to gain visibility with the right people in your organization; you "should" feel inspired and empowered, but somehow, it's just not happening. Instead, you feel anxious and overwhelmed, or straight-out frustrated and angry. And you blame your circumstances or your co-workers. But where does blaming take you?

Why is change so hard?

So why is it so hard to change your habits? – Here’s why: You have created (and re-confirmed) your current habits through your upbringing, your cultural and educational conditioning, your thoughts, and your experiences during your entire life so far... Actually, let me correct that: This downward spiral started even before you were born. Because you already received some of your limiting beliefs in your genes... thank you very much! And the tricky part is that so many of these beliefs are unconscious. Some of them are so absurd, if you’d say them out loud, they wouldn’t make any sense at all to your conscious mind.

But what's not entirely unconscious are your habits. You can observe them. You can become aware of them as you scrutinize your own behavior and identify patterns. This helps you discern the disconnect of what you want to achieve and the behavior that’s not leading you there. Look at your current results and trace them back to certain habits!

That's the first step but it's not enough! Awareness alone won't do it. Getting different results requires different actions, a different behavior. And as we have seen, a different behavior requires a change in habits.

So if change is hard, how can it become easier?

Some say it takes 21 days to create a new habit. For our purpose here, let’s assume this number is correct. If you embarked on one of these 21-day exercises before, you may have seen results… although you may have been guided to work on one single habit at a time. If you do this consistently over a year, you could change 17 habits. The question is: Will you? Because most of us don’t have the patience to work one habit at a time every single day of the year without a system that prompts us to do this.

What if you could have a way to change several habits at a time? Wouldn’t that be amazing?

What if you could establish a daily practice that allows you to change your habits so you can stay aligned with your vision and on track toward it? What if you could control overwhelm, be more productive, improve your professional well-being…. and reprogram yourself into more empowering habits that lead to permanent positive change?

And what if this could accelerate your career? What if it could change your life, give you more success and fulfillment? What if you could live a happier and healthier life with less stress and more freedom?

Sometimes, all we need is some guidance. Guidance to identify limiting root beliefs that, once uncovered, lead to big “aha” moments, which often smash an entire spider web of disempowering beliefs. This creates a tipping effect, and the tower of doom starts to tumble to the ground, leaving us with a completely fresh perspective. It’s beyond the tipping point that significant change can take place, and where you become unstoppable.

That’s why suddenly, we feel so much more inspired and motivated to change our habits. Because we know that one of the main blocks has been removed, a heavy weight was lifted from our shoulders, the road has cleared up, and with continued guidance, we can now move ahead with fresh confidence. And we realize that we’ve successfully embarked on the path of transformation.

Need guidance to get unstuck to get moving? Want to get out of your habit rut? Contact me!