Success is a Habit (Part 1)

We all want success, but…

Everyone wants to achieve a level of success in some areas of life whether it be career success or relationship success or wealth success or whatever it may be which is most important to you. Everyone wants this result they call success, but many never even get ready and poised to even begin taking action on it and they are defeated by their minds before they begin. The internal dialogue kicks in and starts saying something along the lines of:

• It’s going to be hard.
• It’s going to take such a long time.
• I don’t think I can do it.
• It’s too big for me.
• What if I fail?
• What will others think?
• I’m going to have to make sacrifices.

Basically we can tend to make things so big in our mind that we create this internal mountain that we have to climb, with no tools on how to do it and with no clear pathway in sight and ultimately our subconscious mind makes the decision for us that it is too hard and we would have to do too much and change too much and it will be much more comfortable and safer to stay where we are right now. As we give up before we even begin, we then let out a big sigh of relief and say to ourselves

‘phew, now I can relax again and get back to business as usual because at least I can understand that, at least I feel competent there, at least I can predict what is going to happen’

Then, we just continue doing the same things we’ve always done and continue receiving the same set of results we’ve always gotten, until again we get to this point of pressure where we decide we want to change and create success again in whatever area that may be and we start the process all over again.Any of that sound familiar at all? We set ourselves up to fail from word go because we believe it is going to be too big a leap and too dangerous to get there from where we are right now to the level of results that we want to generate in our lives and wind up staying on this treadmill in life going almost nowhere and decide that success is just reserved for extra special people who must have something that we don’t or are just lucky.

Success in life is not about the big things

Here is some hard truth though – this formula is all wrong! Success isn’t about taking crazy big outrageous actions which freak the hell out of us and have a high probability of failure, potential embarrassment and fraught with danger at every turn. It’s not. It’s a lie. Success is not about big stuff; success is about the small stuff. Success is about taking small seemingly insignificant but strategic actions on a consistent basis towards the result we want to create.

In short, success is a matter of habit; doing small things day in day out differently that the average person out there and staying consistent with it. The most beautiful part about knowing that is that if success is about the small stuff and that success is a habit that we can implement, then that means anyone can do it. That means you can do it too! Now on the flipside, the bad thing about knowing that success is about the small things, means that you now no longer have any excuses why you aren’t creating it in your life already or at the very least aren’t on the road towards it. You now have no excuses.

Studies show that up to 40% of our day is made up of unconscious habits. That’s right 40%! Almost half the day is taken up by doing almost the same thing that you did yesterday and the day before and the day before that, and unless you change almost every day into the future will look more or less the same and unless you make a conscious effort and decision to change, then you may be left wondering why year after year you are still in the same position, doing the same things with the same challenges, the same regrets, the same dreams that one day things will change.

But it does not have to be this way. You have to ask yourself:

• ‘When did you decide to take on this habit as your own?’
• ‘Is it actually your habit? Or did you pick it up or inherit it from someone else?’
• ‘Are you doing it just because everyone else does it too?’

These are interesting questions, because most people don’t consciously decide on which habits they will take on, it just seems to happen naturally and set up by our brains, without us even considering if it actually serves our highest selves or the success we want.

Next part of this blog will be posted soon!