Master your habits

Ignite is a resource for people who want to energise their lives and upgrade their games. With twenty powerful, practical skills for those in need of zest and inspiration, you’ll discover how to use stress to your advantage, challenge your comfort zone, set hard-hitting goals, find your purpose and much more.

You most likely don’t spare them much thought, but everyday habits can seriously limit your productivity. These are the automatic settings you default to, and they can be so hardwired in your brain that they can be difficult to change. But they can also be powerful tools you can use to your advantage.

‘Habits are those amazing sparks that light your fire and keep it going,’ explain The Essentialists Shannah Kennedy and Lyndall Mitchell. ‘Habits build your life, your empire and your depth of happiness, and are responsible for your success. They are the secret to advancing yourself, to fuelling a life you love and cherish. The key is to consistently practise the right habits every single day. There has never been as true a saying as ‘Change your habits, change your life.’

From Ignite, here the Essentialists offer some tips for supercharging your habits via simple, productive actions to help fuel your fire for success.  

Habits are thoughts and behaviours so strongly wired into your mind that you perform them without thinking. They are learned and repeated over time, performed automatically, and are persistent, making them hard to break or change. Most of the day you probably think you are making decisions. However, around 40 per cent of the time, you will just do what you have done before – that is, acting according to your habits. This can make you less productive and less effective than you could be.

TIPS TO MASTER YOUR HABITS:

Identify your small, limiting habits ​
Where in life are you not getting the results you want? Do you want more energy, a healthier, stronger, leaner body, more inner harmony, a clearer mind and some space in life? What do you do daily that is not contributing to allowing this to flourish? Where do you sabotage yourself? Are you too critical of yourself, rather than looking for what you do well and acknowledging it? Do you buy lunch daily, which undermines your savings plan? Turn to sugar rather than moving your body for energy? Waste two hours on social media and distraction each day instead of reading a chapter of a book to upskill yourself? Identify these old habits and swap them over for new ones.

Check your internal language ​
‘I must have a coffee to start the day.’ Actually, you don’t. Check where you always say you ‘need’ and ‘must have’ something, and question it. Change the computer program in your mind. What would be an alternative choice that might give you a better result? Instead of coffee, try lemon and water. Instead of ‘I must check my emails first thing in the morning’, you could journal, meditate, exercise and eat well before you check your email in order to own your morning and look after the greatest asset you have – yourself.

Upgrade your mindset ​
A mindset is the mental framework with which you approach your daily life. Change your mindset to be expansive and welcoming to the life you really want, rather than falling back on comforts that in fact sabotage your results. Your routine is the manifestation of a habit. We cannot get rid of or extinguish old habits but we can work with them, change them and upgrade them in order to catapult ourselves to stunning success. Focus on what you will gain from the shift of the habit, rather than what you will lose.

Start with the 1% ​
Do you think you could improve yourself – your health, your happiness, your knowledge, your skills, your diet, your relationships, whatever area of life you want to look at – with just 1 per cent of change per day? Challenge yourself daily with 1 per cent improvements for the rest of your life. Start swapping the negative with a positive. Start refining what you do. Start an incredible awareness campaign in your mind about what you actually do with the minutes of your precious days, how those activities make you feel and if they get you the results you actually want.