Hack Your Habits
I’ve talked about habits a handful of times in this blog, and today I wanted to take a step back and look at habits more generally. These often small, seemingly mundane actions can hold so much power — but how do we access that? Let’s look at how you can hack your habits to maximize their potential:
Take time to assess
Habits can be tricky because they usually fly under the radar. Part of what makes them habits is that we’re so accustomed to doing them, we don’t really have to think about it. This can be great when it comes to doing things that support your success, but it can also be highly detrimental to repeat an action that’s holding you back day after day. If you want to get more out of your daily habits, it’s worth taking an audit of where you are now. Try to review your daily routines and pull out the actions you do habitually. Then you can start to evaluate which ones are helping you and which ones might be limiting your potential.
Connect to your goals
As you start to refine your habits, you’ll likely want to create some new ones. It’s easy to read an article of some successful person’s ten habits for success and feel like you need to adopt them all, but this is rarely useful. It’s fine for inspiration, but the real place to start is with your goals. What are the things that are most important to you? What are you working to achieve? These are the things you want your habits to support. Identifying those small actions that will help you progress and making them a part of your daily routine is where the real power lies.
Start slowly
As you come up with new habits, it can be tempting to want to incorporate them all at once. But this usually backfires. Even though the actions may seem small, it takes time for us to change what’s familiar and turn a new action into a habit. I’d recommend choosing one new habit and committing to that for a few weeks. Once that becomes a natural part of your day, try adding in another. If you overwhelm yourself with too many new things all at once, you risk having none of them stick
Prioritize consistency
The foundation of a habit is its consistency. It’s part of the definition. So as you work to create and incorporate new habits, keep this in mind. You want to choose actions that you can realistically do every day. Sure, you might miss a day here and there, but you want to choose habits that make sense in your life. If you’re trying to make major changes, work incrementally rather than giving yourself something challenging that you’ll only do occasionally.
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These are just a few of my strategies for making the most of my habits. Have you tried any of these in your own life? Do you have any other strategies to maximize your habits? Which habits have had the most impact on your success? I’d love to hear your thoughts!