7 Tips on Cultivating Habits for Success
How do you define success? Everyone defines it differently. For some, it’s financial security. For others, it’s personal fulfillment. For you, it might be something entirely different. There’s probably as many definitions of success as there are people.
But one thing is certain about success: It takes more than just hard work to achieve it—no matter how you define it. To achieve success, you need to cultivate good habits. Without them, you’ll never achieve it or develop a deeper connection to your authentic self.
What are good habits? Good habits take you one step closer to achieving a goal or goals. They inspire and motivate you. They also encourage you to make positive changes in your life. Successful people develop good habits that drive success as they define it.
Seven Habits of Successful People
Brian Tracy, a recognized authority on personal success, has studied the subject for more than 30 years and has written extensively on it. Listed below are Tracy’s seven habits of success, as discussed in a recent blog post. To succeed, says Tracy, successful people:
- Set goals for things
- Become result-oriented
- Take action all the time
- Put relationships first
- Are health conscious
- Are honest and forthright
- Are self-disciplined
- Every one of these habits, says Tracy, can be developed with work. Once developed, they give you control over your life as well as the development of your character and personality.
More important, they give you control of what happens to you in the future. And that’s what you need to achieve success—whatever that means to you.
Cultivating Habits For Success
Cultivating good quality habits for success is a challenge. You don’t form them in a day. They take perseverance and repetition. They also take planning and patience. How quickly we develop good habits depends on the intensity of the emotion that supports your decision to create the habits. The greater the intensity of the emotion accompanying the forming of the habits, the faster they will take root.
Below are seven tips on cultivating good quality habits:
- Identify why you want this habit — For good habits to take root, you must identify a reason or reasons for developing them. Ask yourself what they will help you achieve once you make them part of your everyday life.
- Set clear and specific goals — Goals are paramount when creating good habits. They drive habit formation. But the goals must be clear and specific. Focus on one or two goals at a time and make sure they’re important to you and to what you want to achieve
- Take habits for a test drive — If trying to cultivate a life-changing habit seems daunting to you, take it for a 21-day test drive. Research shows that that’s how long it takes to make or break a habit. After test driving the habit, you can decide if the habit is worth keeping.
- Make time for developing habits — If you’re like most people, you’re busy—very busy. So if you want to cultivate good habits, you must make it a priority. If you don’t, you’ll probably leave them as the last thing to do on your schedule and never get to it.
- Eliminating things that can go wrong — It’s easy for something to misfire when cultivating habits. To make things go smoothly, try thinking of what could go wrong beforehand and preempt it by providing a solution for it.
- Find reinforcing habits — Habits don’t exist in isolation. Usually, they’re linked to other habits. For example, eating healthy and exercising are related. Remove existing habits that don’t reinforce the new habits and add ones that do.
- Track your progress — Once you set a goal for developing a habit, create a benchmark or benchmarks that show progress. Achieving one or more of these can drive you to achieve the next benchmark or set of benchmarks.
Everyone defines success differently. But no matter how you define it, the formula is always the same. Set realistic goals for yourself and create good quality habits designed to help you reach your goals. The seven tips described above can help you cultivate good quality habits.
If you need help developing habits for success, try our Inner-guide planning pads. Easy to use, they’re the ideal tools to help you turn your vision of success into reality. Use them alone or with our Inner-Guide Planner.
