Create goal-orientated habits
You have to create habits to achieve your goals. These habits should get you closer to your goals.
It requires you to forge positive daily habits (or goal habits) that, when accomplished each day, brings you much closer to achieving your personal goals.
There is an easy trick that you can use to forge new daily habits. This will help you accomplish the goals behind your dreams.
It involves a simple three-step process:
(1) Define a new daily activity that will help you accomplish a specific goal.
(2) Devote 20 minutes a day to that new activity.
(3) Repeat that activity daily for 30 days.
This new activity could be 20 minutes of daily reading to expand your knowledge. It will enable you to become more proficient. It could accomplish an individual goal of getting a professional certification.
Another activity could also be 20 minutes a day of making phone calls to various influencers with whom you would like to develop a relationship. These influencers can open doors. It could help you accomplish your goals and realise your dreams.
Over time, it will become easier and easier to engage in the activity.
This daily activity will become an automatic, unconscious behaviour, or a habit.
Interestingly, our brain loves habits.
Habits conserve brain fuel.
It frees up the prefrontal cortex by shifting control of the habit to the limbic system.
Once freed up, the prefrontal cortex can now focus on other important things.
But it does take effort, repetition, and time in order to get your brain cells talking to each other.
Thirty days gets the conversation going inside the brain.
Once your new habit sticks, you can move on to your next new habit following the same three-step process.
Do develop goal-orientated activities that will increase your superhuman performance.
In the course of a year, you will add many more new habits using this three-step process.
In a few years, you will have created dozens of new habits. Your life will begin to improve as you accomplish one goal after another and realise one dream after another.
Habits are like snowflakes on the side of a steep mountain. You hardly notice, on a daily basis, the snow accumulating. But after many months, that accumulation is so significant, it causes an avalanche.
After many years, the cumulative effect of those habits can turbocharge your superhuman performance.
Create purposeful routines to make your decisions come alive
Step 3 is all about creating purposeful routines that will bring your decisions to life and achieve your goals.
Constantly putting yourself into a peak mental state every single day can intentionally create the future life you want to live.
Purposeful and goal-orientated routines ensure that you have absolute clarity and direction every single day.
You’ll know how to operate at peak performance levels throughout your day. You have seemingly endless energy and focus.
In effect, you are creating your ideal world through routines and habits.
You are going to break past all emotional blocks.
Live a life of true freedom.
What you want in life comes from clarity in these routines. They will put you in a place where you have more time to be more effective and get way more results.
First thing in the morning, write
When you first wake up, your brain is operating on rocket fuel. When you learn to leverage your morning brain, you are going to change your entire life.
First thing in the morning is when you want to make the most powerful decisions. This time could be your most productive time.
Your subconscious is completely primed for pumping out new ideas.
Unfortunately, most people, even before they get out of bed, is to jump straight onto their electronic devices. We have become so addicted to devices.
We have become so unproductive in the morning, squandering on the opportunity to perform at our peak.
Rather than proactively putting themselves in a peak state of actively creating the future that they want, many people are living reactively to their environment. They let their circumstances and devices take over. They let their bad habits dictate their destiny.
Therefore, the first thing you really want to do is NOT to jump onto your devices.
Instead, you really want to step into a new environment for daily peak performance.
Start your mornings by thinking, meditating, or visualising the future you want to create.
There’s a big difference between a thought that enters our mind, and a thought that we continue to think about.
In a negative sense, ‘continuing to think about something’ is called worry.
In a positive sense, ‘continuing to think about something’ is called meditation.
I choose what I allow myself to think about. I want to choose wisely.
Start a daily journal. Write down your thoughts daily.
You may also want to write down your daily goals. New habits can be formed.
When you write something down, it becomes more real to you. It becomes more tangible.
When you are consistently journalling, you can process how you are feeling. You get clarity as to who you are, what you want to do, and how to achieve your goals.
Journal;ing overcomes complacency and any potential life crisis.
In fact, it is actually the secret to maintaining clarity. When you write things down, you become more productive, more creative, and more purposeful and focused than ever before.
You really want to feel and see what it would be like to achieve what you wrote down. As you do this, you reinforce your future identity.
You are essentially developing a new brain!
Stop operating from your past, start creating your future
Many people are operating from their past.
When they wake up, they let their environment or circumstances take over.
Instead, you want to operate from your created future.
When you wake up, begin the day by visualising and meditation and writing down the person you want to be. Then begin feeling and acting that future person.
Here’s the thing.
If you want to be a millionaire, you act like a millionaire.
Be bold to acquire those future-focused behaviours and habits. It will shape your new identity and guide your actions.
Confidence is the by-product of your behavior. Acting for that future is going to increase your confidence and reduced fear and uncertainties. It is going to propel you towards the future that you have created for yourself.
Consciously live from your future. Don’t live in the past.
Many people do have low confidence because their behaviour in the morning is unconscious and reactive.
But if you consciously put yourself into a state where you’re constantly thinking about your future, you will increase your confidence through positive behaviours and mindset about your future.
You will slowly get small wins.
Minimise decision fatigue by setting up your own future
Where appropriate, prepare the night before just before you go to sleep.
Here’s a practical example you can relate to.
If you want to go to the gym early in the next morning, before work, you would get your gym bag ready the night before right next to the door. You will have it already so that you don’t have to think about it again when you wake up in the morning.
You are eliminating any excuses for not going to the gym. You are avoiding unhealthy morning circumstances that could negatively dictate your actions.
Decision fatigue is your number one enemy.
Excuses will be your next enemy to overcome.
When you set your gym bag by the door, it means that you have truly decided beforehand that you’re going to the gym immediately after you wake up in the morning. You have intentionally set up your own environment for success rather than leaving it to chance.
You have eliminated all potential excuses that may creep into your decision-making process.
Resting and taking time to detach and recover
Always detach and recover from work. In Step 4, give yourself a break especially from devices and work.
In doing so, you have more work-life balance instead.
You become more productive.
The unhealthy use of phones and devices increases stress, depression, and anxiety. It decreases your sleep quality.
When you put yourself into a peak state of performance every single day, you need time for recovery to maintain clarity, purpose, and joy in the journey.
By resting, you are being productive. You are giving time to regenerate and recharge yourself. Rest gives you time to recover.
By resting, you are reducing your stress levels and anxieties.
You get better clarity as to your goals and what you want to achieve.
Stephen Covey talks about sharpening the saw. The same principles apply to us.
We need to take time regularly to stop and sharpen our saws so that we can continuously be productive over a longer period of time. It is a marathon, not a sprint.
When we do not take time to sharpen our saw, the saw gets blunt easily. Over time, it will take much longer to cut wood with a very blunt saw.
Likewise, when we do not constantly renew our bodies and mind through rest and meditation, we become very unproductive over time.
In fact, our productivity decreases and our stress levels increase.
Even employees are not expected to work without a break at work!
Just do it and acquire superhuman performance
Do you sometimes feel like you’re a hamster on a wheel putting in lots and lots of effort into making no progress?
Do you want to avoid living a life of regret completely unsatisfied with what’s happening around you?
Get an accountability partner in your community to help you stay motivated and focused towards pursuing your goals. You need to be accountable for your goals.
When you don’t have a positive community, there’s no guarantee that you’re moving in the direction you want to go.
Peter Drucker wisely told us that “smart people need a safe place among peers to think their confusion out loud.”
We need some people around us to bring the required encouragement, perspective, and a place where you can talk about it and gain clarity as you do.