Trevor Scharpenberg – @ScharpFitness
“A daily routine built on good habits is the difference that separates the most successful amongst us from everyone else.”– Darren Hardy
This quote is from a book I recently read, “The Compound Effect.” It dives into the importance of all the little things that we subconsciously do throughout the day. Believe it or not, every minute and every action is stacking up for you or against you. There is no between.
Habits, by definition, are a regular tendency that is hard to give up. This can also stack up for us or against us. If you have a habit of eating poorly, sleeping through your alarm clock and showing up late to work, you are likely going to be doing these things on a daily basis, therefore, working against you. Negative habits can drastically influence how your day begins and ends. If every morning you wake up late because you slept through your alarm, you will feel rushed and defeated right out of the gate for the day. Habits are actions that we do without even recognizing we do them.
What’s one way that you could defeat your habit of snoozing the alarm? Try moving your alarm clock across your room so that in the morning you are forced to get up and turn it off. You will no longer be able to habitually roll over and press snooze. This will soon change your habit and result in much better days, simply because you are starting with achieving something within the first seconds of the day. You successfully woke up on time.
Good habits are ones that work for us, something that has become a cornerstone in our life. Some call it an “anchor” and I really like that analogy. For me, lifting weights in the morning is my biggest habit. I have been doing it for so long now that on the few times that I do workout in the afternoon, my whole day is thrown for a loop. Everything feels different and I have to learn how to adjust with that. To me, this is a good habit because it gets me up and motivated for the day to come. Following my workout, I have a habit to read and write before I go to class. It was hard to break my bad habit of sleeping in but I used the alarm clock trick and now I rarely struggle to wake up to my alarm.
All of us have our own good/bad habits. The major key is identifying them and using them both as leverage for you. Use the bad habits as awareness that you need change and use the good habits as an anchor to keep you crushing your goals. Identification is the first step. After that sit down and write out what daily habits you want to have. At the end of each day go through and check to see if you did them. If you haven’t, simply do them before you go to bed. It takes about 21 days to create a habit. Try this out and mark off each item on your list and I promise that you’ll have a noticeable difference in your daily actions at the end of those 21 days.
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