How Your Habits Control Your Business Success
©2005 by Rose Hill
Habit: A consistent behavior you perform so frequently that it is
automatic.
For example, if you learned to drive a car with a standard
transmission, the first few lessons were pretty jerky while you
learned to synchronize the clutch with the accelerator pedal. If you
released the clutch too fast, the car would stall. If you pressed the
accelerator too fast without releasing the clutch, you raced the
engine but you and the car were still sitting there! However, with
practice, practice, and more practice, you learned to synchronize
control of the clutch with control of the accelerator so that you don’t
even think about it any more. It is now a habit.
All habits consist of knowledge combined with skill from practice.
What all this means is that you can learn new habits to replace those
that are no longer working for you. You have to change what you’re
doing, how you’re doing it, and the choices you make in order to
change your business results.
If you keep doing what you’ve always done,
you’ll keep getting what you’ve always gotten.
That means that if your business is not headed in the direction you
desire right now, you must make new choices and start new habits to
ensure you ultimately get the results you want.
Your choices of habits, determine your success.
That may seem harsh to you. Especially if you’d like credit for having
“Good Intentions.” The fact is that your intentions, however good, are
immaterial until they are supported by your behaviors. In fact, good
intentions that are not actualized will drain you of the energy
necessary to take effective action. Remember, the only question of
significance is “What's working and What's not?”
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Habits are part of being human; we all have them. We use them to
conserve energy and effort; to provide familiarity/security; to free up
energy for other things; to improve and fine-tune our skills; and to
assist in avoiding physical and/or mental pain. Often, a particular
habit can lose its usefulness. Yet, because we are human we tend to
continue the habit, knowingly or unknowingly. Only with awareness
and a strong reason or motivation to change can we initiate and
sustain change.
Habits tap into the nearly human obsession to be (and to appear)
consistent with what we have already done. Once we have made a
choice or taken a stand, we encounter personal and interpersonal
pressures to behave consistently with that commitment. For good or
for ill, the drive to be (and to look) consistent constitutes a highly
potent weapon of change.
To understand why consistency is so powerful a motive, it is
important to recognize that in most circumstances consistency is
valued and adaptive. Inconsistency is commonly thought to be an
undesirable personality trait. The person whose beliefs, words, and
actions don’t match may be seen as indecisive, confused, two-faced,
or worse.
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On the other side, a high degree of consistency is normally
associated with personal and intellectual strength. Certainly, then,
the personal consistency brought by habits is highly valued because
it provides us with a reasonable and gainful orientation to the world.
Most of the time we are well served by habits... without them our
lives and our businesses are difficult, erratic, and disjointed.
By superimposing a new habit on top of an existing habit, you can
create a new way of doing things. In other words, you start replacing
old negative habits with new positive habits.
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For example, if you always show up late for meetings, your stress
levels are probably high and you feel unprepared. To improve this
you might decide to develop a new habit of arriving five minutes early for every appointment, including meetings. If you take on this
challenge you might notice:
By systematically replacing your negative habits with new positive
habits one at a time you can dramatically change all aspects of your
business.