One way to discover and reach your potential is through the development of strong habits, the patterns of your life. One of the greatest pieces of advice I’ve received is to “Set small goals that can be achieved in a short amount of time.” The point of this exercise was not to change my whole life in a single day, but to make small, incremental changes over time. This is what habits are for. Every day small decisions that shape the course of our lives. I’ve seen the incredible impact of getting a little bit better every day. It’s hard to beat someone who is progressing and growing.
Daily growth begins in your habits. The habits we develop in our lives determine our paradigm. Your paradigm is the pattern of your life. How you spend your time, how you prioritize, and the goals you set for yourself all contribute to that paradigm. Each of those is determined by your habits.
What is a habit?
“An acquired behavior pattern regularly followed until it has become almost involuntary”
Habits are behavior patterns and they become the paradigm of our lives. They help us grow and develop into better versions of ourselves. Through everyday small simple tasks, we can see long term and sustainable growth throughout our life.
Developing Habits:
The best way you can start is by narrowing down the habits you would like to start building into your life. You may not be able to change overnight, but we all have to start somewhere. What are the habits you’d like to focus on? Start with two to three, and once those become second nature, add in another, and if you want to continue growing, keep repeating this process and building healthy habits into your life.
Identifying unhealthy habits is equally as important as building good habits. Often these unhealthy habits can hold us back from growth. Some of these can often be overlooked and we may not even realize we have them.
Here are a few common ones:
- Excessive screen time. Do you ever find yourself scrolling on social media and an hour later wondering where the time went? Too much media can become a habit in our lives that limits our growth and lessons our productivity and time spent with our family and friends.
- Too little or too much sleep.
- Lack of exercise and poor diet choices.
- Procrastination.
These are just a few, but once we start to identify the ones holding us back, we can break those off by replacing them with new, healthy habits to optimize our growth and set us on a path towards ultimate freedom. What are the patterns of your life?
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