Habits can transform your life and habits can destroy your life as well, depending on the habit you have developed and want to develop. Building habit is not as difficult as we assume. We might do not follow the right method to form a new habit. Here are some do’s and don’ts.
Walk slowly but never backward
The biggest mistake is to do all at once. Something that hasn’t done before will take time to happen. Make sure you start with smallest and easiest task of the habit. So that your mind has no excuse. The key here is to start with the easiest with slow progress and with gradual improvement. The point to remember here is to make the task easy not doing only easy task. For example:-
- Want to read 10 pages per day. Start with reading a single page.
- Want to jog for 1 hour, start with 10 mintues.
- Want to do 100 push ups, start with 10.
Best is the enemy of good
As it is discussed that we should start with a small task, but we want everything to be perfect. We believe to complete the task with perfection. It is great that you start something first time and completed it with perfection but its all okay if you could be the best first time. It is almost impossible to be best in something in your initial phase. Even most of us do not start because they believe in perfection. Remember that best is the enemy of good hence, it is suggested to start with imperfection and move toward betterment.
Our mind is lazy. It tries to find all possible and smallest reason to avoid doing hard things. The best way to fight with the laziness is to make task easy where mind does not feel it like work. Learn to trick your mind, try to think about your own thoughts and start giving thoughts as you want your mind to think.
Action mode vs Motion mode
There is a line between motion and action mode however they both may sound similar. Action mode is result oriented. It is simple as it means to act or to do something which provides either positive or negative result. On the other hand, motion mode feels like action but it is not result oriented. Every task done before taking actual action that has no real result comes in motion mode. Such as research on diet plan is motion mode but eating healthy is action mode. To surprise you, planning comes in motion mode as well because it does not provide real result.
Have you ever noticed why you keep collecting information and keep researching about something? And in reality you don’t take action could not use those information and knowledge. The reason is being in motion mode. Motion mode create an illusion that we are taking action, but in reality there is no result.
So if it is your case, make sure to take action as soon as possible because over planning becomes a form of procrastination. When it comes to build a new habit taking repeated action is the solution. Habit forms based on frequency not time.