Habits can’t appear from nothing: they often are the results of your own conscious choices. They give freedom, they don’t make you take decisions and watch after yourself every single second. Nearly 40% of your everyday life is formed by habits, so it shouldn’t be bad to develop some of them. How about those which can make you happier, more successful and hard-working? Let’s take a look on ways to work on these habits.
Determine What You Are Going to Learn
1. Time For Big Thoughts
Everyday life is characterized with a high tempo. Due to this, you don’t have time to think about your global life goals. Who do you wish to be 5 years later? What is the way for you to develop your skills in order to make your working performance higher? And what about developing yourself as a specialist? People are all different, that is why for someone 30 minutes a week is enough for such thoughts, someone needs more than one day, and somebody prefers thinking on world problems while having a bike trip.
Some people will think on eternity sitting alone with a notebook, others will meet their old friends and discuss everything with people they trust. The process is yours, the result is finding out what you really want.
2.Think on Small Details
Sometimes, while trying to reach the ambitious goals as soon as possible, people overload themselves and forget about small routine things. They are not less important for your comfort: it’s sometimes useful to concentrate on small & controlled activities you can complete instantly. What do you need to study today in order to become a better student, and to get good marks (to become a good & well-payed specialist in future)?
3.Who Do You Envy?
Envy is an extremely negative emotion, but it can serve you as a good stimulus while analyzing yourself. If you feel envy on someone, this means that person has something you really want to get, too. Who do you envy: a friend who travels a lot, or a friend who never needs anything, or a friend who can talk without thinking? Feeling envy helps you to figure out the direction you want to go and the way you wish to develop your personality.
Make Learning Your Habit
4. Put Precise Goals
Plans like “to read more”, “to wake up earlier”, “to study something new” are too broad and unprecise. Say directly what you want to achieve. Shape your goal as a precise, measurable and controllable action. Example: “to visit meetings devoted to my future profession once in a month”, “to read 60 books on my hobby during the year”, “to spend two hours every Saturday reading the articles saved in bookmarks before”. When put precisely, your goal will motivate you to act.
5.Control Your Habits
Control maintains a strange power upon a person. Mostly, when people only start controlling their behavior, their performance (in a job, or studying, or anything) becomes much better. Besides, there is no difference what kind of control happens: counting the quantity of steps from your apartment to the nearest supermarket or counting the number of your daily phone calls. The same activity can be applied for notating how much time you spend studying your learning books or practicing any new skill. Control the introductory process of a new habit, and this will help you move the right way.
6.Make a Plan for Your Habit
A goal formed like “to study something cool” will constantly lay in a dusty part of your to-do-list storage. Yes, it is obviously important for you, but you don’t have a determined deadline when to complete it, and that is the reason why you will constantly delay it for better times. Planning a precise time for learning something new is really important and helpful.
7.Do Not Procrastinate
Delaying your job till another day is not worth it. If there is a task planned for any moment of time, don’t do anything except of it. No email checks, no tea breaks, no phone calls. You’ll do all the rest later, after things you planned are done. Otherwise, you’ll constantly live with a feeling of something to be unfinished. That’s sad.
8.Spend Time with Right People
This means spending your time with someone, who’s habits you’d like to get for yourself. Researches confirm, that people can take the habits of their environment, so choose your company carefully. If you know some of your groupmates to have learning as their habit already, try spending more time with them. This will help you get used and will make the process of forming a new habit much easier.
And, probably, the most important thing you’ve got to know about habits. Everyone has to get habits, which can help them improve themselves as a person: to widen one’s outlook, to level-up professional skills, etc. When you do something that is useful for you personally, you double your chance to get a new habit.
