How to Change Your Habits
No matter what your goals are, chances are you’re going to have to change your habits to achieve them.
When you’re focused on the outcome of a specific goal-say, to lose 20 pounds or save 10k-you’re so focused on the end result that you’re not focused on your day-to-day habits or the identity shift needed to become the person who achieves your goals.
But changing your habits is easier said than done.
So, let’s talk how to change your habits.
How to Change Your Habits
Identity
The secret to changing your habits long-term is to change your identity to match the behavior.
Your current identity and behaviors are what are stopping you from accomplishing your goals.
If you still have the identity of someone who struggles in a specific area-for example, let’s say accumulating wealth-your habits will confirm as much.
Changing your identity starts with changing your self-image. Who do you need to be to become the woman who achieved her goal to lose 20 pounds or save 10k?
You can’t wait until “one day” or when xyz happens to change your identity-it has to come first, or the “one day” you’re waiting for will never come.
Related:
- 6 Reasons Why New Year Resolutions Don’t Work
- 11 Habits that Make You Unhappy
- Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones
The Problem with Motivation
Often times, people use motivation as a tool to help them create lasting change. And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with this either. Filling your brain with positive input from books, podcasts, and even websites such as this one offer encouragement.
But ultimately, the change has to come from within, as no amount of motivation can evoke lasting change.
We will always work to prove ourselves true, which is why it’s imperative to change your self-image and identity, versus focusing on outlets that keep us motivated, while overlooking the root cause blocking us from change.
Related:
- 5 Things You Must Let Go of to Achieve Success
- How Change Improves Your Life
- Grow You (virtual coaching)
- 3 Keys to Building Self-Confidence
Defaults
Our defaults confirm our self-image. In order to live an intentional life, you must change your defaults.
A default is a habitual, go-to mode of operation, for better or for worse.
For example, if you pick up a sugary Starbucks drink on your way to the office every morning, this is a default. If you pour yourself a glass of wine as soon as you get home from the office, this is a default.
On the other hand, you may prepare a weeks’ worth of healthy lunches for the week ahead on Sunday night, or routinely wake up each morning with enough time to work out every morning before work. These are also defaults.
What are your defaults, and how are they supporting or hindering you from changing into the person you need to be who achieves their goals?
Take a moment to evaluate your defaults and decide if they support the person you want to become or hinder you from becoming that person.
Abandoning old habits (or defaults) that don’t serve us, and creating new habits, which lead to new defaults, is an uncomfortable process, no doubt. But the discomfort is paving the way for the new, future you with habits and defaults that support this truth.
Take actions one day at a time that create evidence to support the identity of who you need to be to achieve your goals. Do this until you are walking in that identity.
Related:
- How to Quit Anything
- 8 Keys to Self-Improvement
- Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create A New One
- How to Set Goals and Achieve Them
Before You Go
In order to accomplish your goals, you first need to change your habits. But changing your habits starts with changing your self-image and your identity first so you can take actions and create behaviors that support this identity, which will lead to lasting change and ultimately, accomplishing your goals.
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