Achieve your goals 'automatically' by developing good habits
Sat, 4 August 2018
Do you have a big goal you want to achieve?
This may include losing weight, getting out of debt, starting a relationship or developing your spiritual life.
If it is a big goal, it will likely require consistent action on a daily basis to see the goal achieved.
"Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out."
Robert Collier
For example, to achieve a goal of losing weight, you need to eat healthy food EVERY DAY and exercise CONSISTENTLY in order to reach your goal weight. No matter how great the diet is, if you don’t stick to it, it won’t work. Similarly, for a goal of running a marathon you need to train over a period of months before you can realise your goal.
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." Aristotle
As Aristotle puts it, we are what we repeatedly do. Therefore to become excellent in any area requires more than just a one-time act. Remaining ‘consistent’ is where the problem occurs for most of us. We follow our diet for a day or two, but then we lose focus, get distracted or some unexpected event occurs to throw us off course.
Chances are, we were relying on motivation and willpower to help us achieve our goals which unfortunately are very limited resources. A bad night’s sleep, an argument with our spouse or a stressful day at work can be all that’s needed to throw us off course and fall into old destructive habits.
INSTEAD of relying on willpower and motivation to achieve our goals, we need to focus on developing HABITS that will lead us to our goals ‘automatically’.
By their nature, habits are behaviour that is ‘frequently repeated’ and often ‘unconscious’.
Unconscious means we no longer need to think about or motivate ourselves to take an action – we do it automatically. For example, you don’t need to motivate yourself to clean your teeth each day – you do it automatically. Driving is an automatic action as is walking, talking, chewing our food etc. You don’t consciously think about how to talk, you just do it.
You will find that anyone who has achieved a big goal has had to develop new HABITS and become a NEW PERSON in order to achieve their goal.
For example, if your goal is to lose weight, you will need to develop new habits such as healthy eating and regular exercise. Once you have developed these as ‘habits’ though, the achievement of your goal is virtually guaranteed. By taking small consistent action over time, you WILL reach your goal. You BECOME a healthy, fit person.
Another advantage of developing good habits is that they are largely PERMANENT. You can thereby avoid the pitfalls of fad or ‘crash’ diets that can’t be sustained over the long term and as a result people fall back into old habits and regain all the weight that was lost.
So if you have a big goal you want to achieve but in the past have lacked willpower, motivation and drive to make it a reality, focus on developing great habits instead. You will conserve energy and put your goals on ‘autopilot’. If you want to write a book, develop the habit of writing for an hour each day. If you want to run a marathon, run each day.
Determine what small consistent actions are required to reach your goal and turn these into habits.
To learn how to achieve your goals by creating great habits, To book a time to talk with me about achieving your goals please use the following link http://meetme.so/penniequailepearce
Comments
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Adina Newton says:
Sunday, 5 August 2018 at 10:24am
I love how consise and precise the guidance is. It teaches me how to achieve goals and change my life for the better. This is amazing.