Words Of Wealth

The first chapter of “The Power of Focus“–Your Habits Will Determine Your Future–is important enough to spend a lot of time and attention on. It’s so powerful in fact, that I could study it weekly for an entire year and still have progress left to make.

This chapter is all about habits, and how everything we do throughout each day is a combination of small habits that make up our daily routines.

“Your everyday normal behavior has a lot to do with the results in your life. If you’re not happy with these results, something has to change.”

Changing habits takes time and concentrated effort. And as the book rightly points out: Some habits are more deeply ingrained than others, so they may take more time and effort to adjust than others. Small, simple habits can often be changed in about a month but the larger, more complicated ones can take much longer.

The good news of course–and the primary focus of this first chapter–is that habits can be changed. And by changing bad habits into good ones, you’re able to create the success you want in life.

“By systematically improving one behavior at a time you can dramatically improve your overall lifestyle. This includes your health, income, relationships and time off for fun.”

The chapter goes on to discuss common bad habits and provides excellent techniques to help you replace them with good habits. Weaved in are personal stories about both simple and complex bad habits people have tackled and successfully changed.

Bad habits are a personal sticking point for me. I’m pretty good at changing them once I’ve put my mind to it, but I have the bad habit of waiting until a habit starts really annoying me before I decide to do anything about it.

When my kids were small and I was first starting my own business, I found myself constantly losing track of what needed to be done, when. Things got bad enough at one point that I was even forgetting to make sure the kids got their baths. When I realized this I got fed up and decided it had to change. Now. So I implemented the habit of scheduling and that solved the problems pretty quickly.

At another point in my life I was in the habit of checking email every 15 minutes because I’d been providing customer support services for a client. When that contract went away and I refocused my business on writing, the habit of checking email was a huge distraction and problem for me. I had spent several years in customer support roles, so the habit of constantly responding to others quickly was entrenched really deeply. It took many months of focused effort to break that habit and even today–many years later–I will sometimes find myself checking email off schedule and for no apparent reason.

Late last year I implemented the basic financial success habit of paying myself first. I’ve talked previously about my bad habits with budgeting so for me this was an important first step. Technically I implemented two new habits at once: Making and keeping a budget plus putting away 10% of my income first, then living off the remaining 90%.

Trying to change too many habits at once is risky because you can become overwhelmed. This is the biggest problem with New Year’s resolutions actually… people make lots of big plans, they they try to do them all at once.

The Power of Focus–and many other success books for that matter–strongly advise you to focus on changing just one bad habit at a time. This lets you get a solid hold on one new success habit–let it become routine enough in your life to become a true habit–before attempting to add another.

I need to update my list of habits, reprioritize them and create the habit of making new positive habits so that I can continue making progress towards my own personal and financial success. Two big ones I seem to be constantly addressing are:

1. Sporadic Consistency
and
2. Snoozing the Alarm Clock

If you struggle with bad habits too, I strongly recommend you spend some time studying Chapter 1 in The Power of Focus, and implementing The Successful Habits Formula provided at the end.