A habit is something you do often enough that it becomes easy. Therefore, it is a behavior that you keep repeating. Do you know the best habits for success? You can rid yourself of bad habits and build good ones to bring success much faster.
If you have a habit you want to change, you can reprogram yourself at any time.
If you want to change your money-making habits, check your spending habits. One important thing to do is to save or invest 10% of your income each month. Think of it — if you invest $100 per month in an account that will compound annually at 10%, and start this plan when you are 18, by the time you are 65 you will have saved more than $1.1 million.
However, if you didn’t start saving at age 18, you will have to come up with another plan.
Change Must Involve Commitment
You cannot dabble in change. If so, you will quit your efforts to change the habit after a few weeks or months, and you will have a long list of excuses 
why you couldn’t do it. You must make a commitment to change.
If you wish to succeed, you can do so if you realize that your habits will determine your future. To get to the top, it takes focused action, personal discipline, and energy to pursue your goal every day.
Many of us these days live our lives for immediate gratification. Folks who have this “get it now” habit can often spend in excess of their budget. If you let this behavior develop into a chronic bad habit, you could face bad consequences, such as bankruptcy.
Negative habits lead to negative results. Successful habits can bring you positive rewards. With focus, you can change negative consequences into positive rewards. All you have to do is change your habits now.
We are told it takes about 21 days to change or develop a habit. If you want to change a habit, figure out how long it has been one. If it has been a habit for 30 years, you might not be able to change it in three or four weeks.
Some things, such as low self-esteem that you have carried for a long time, will take longer to change, perhaps even a year or more. However, when you are able to make the change, you will affect both your personal and professional life.
Consistency Is Important
When you are working on a change, be careful not to slip back into old ways of doing things. Stress can cause this regression. Perhaps your new habit is not yet strong enough to resist the circumstances.
Use a checklist, just like an astronaut, to insure consistency. Put every procedure you need to follow on that checklist. In this way you can create your own fail-safe system.
Do you realize that up to 90% of your normal behavior is based on habits? Much of our activity is based on a routine we have had for years. If our lives become too routine, we can become complacent and life can be boring.
We settle for less than we are capable of. We do so much of our routine without thinking. This everyday normal behavior has a lot to do with the 
results we are getting in our lives. If we are not happy with our results, we need to change something.
Now, when you consciously work on those habits, and superimpose a new behavior on top of your present behavior, you then create a new standard of performance. You will find you produce more. Now you are replacing old bad habits with new successful ones.
Many of our habits that might need changing are invisible. Think about all the little things you do that could be holding you back. How are you at keeping commitments, such as returning phone calls, being prompt for appointments, or poor communication habits?
Perhaps you don’t do paperwork quickly, or handle the mail six times instead of one, or don’t pay bills or collect money due you in a timely fashion. Maybe you don’t take enough time to do fun things with your family, or you might be a severe procrastinator.
Which Are The Habits That Don’t Work For You?
Those are just a few suggestions to consider. Think about your life. Think about the habits that are not working for you. Those are the ones you need to change.
Sit down for some uninterrupted time and make a list of all the habits that make you unproductive. You need to study the bad habits and obstacles to your goals. Until you understand what is holding you back, it is difficult to create a more productive way of doing things.
You can ask for feedback. Talk to folks you admire and respect, and who know you well. Ask them what they observe about your bad habits. If you talk to ten people and eight of them list the same bad habit, pay attention.
Remember that your outer behavior is the truth, and your inner perception of your behavior is often an illusion. If you can accept good honest feedback, you should be able to make quick adjustments and eliminate bad habits for once and for all.
The family you grew up in can influence your belief system. If you grew up in a family where they were supportive, you will have a much different world view than the person who was brought up in a negative environment, subjected over and over again to physical or verbal abuse.
An abusive environment can often produce feelings of worthlessness and fear. Such a person will have a lack of confidence. When this type of belief system is carried forward into adulthood, it can produce many unproductive habits, such as drug addiction, criminal activity, and the inability to hold a job.
Peer pressure is another factor. If you are around people who constantly complain about how bad everything is, these beliefs may start rubbing off on you. Conversely, if your environment is positive, you will more likely see the world as full of opportunity and adventure.
Positive Beliefs Reinforce Performance
If you believe you are good at something, you will perform better. This improved performance will then affect future self-belief. If you feel you are no good at anything, this belief will have a very damaging effect on anything you try.
It is common to have a mix of self-beliefs, some of which are positive and some negative. Someone might see himself as good at sports and rotten at his job. Find your negative beliefs — those are the ones that you need to replace.
Remember that to change, you have to commit to change. When you are ready, you may find that the right people start showing up to help you.
Study successful people. Become a Napoleon Hill, who did just that and then wrote his inspirational book, Think and Grow Rich. Successful people leave clues.
Invite that person out to a meal, and ask lots of questions. Learn about their disciplines, routines, and habits. What do they read? What organizations do they belong to? How do they schedule their time? Listen and take notes.
Don’t come up with rationalizations as to why you couldn’t find anyone to question. Be resourceful — find out where they work and what places they frequent.
Read autobiographies and biographies of famous people. These books can give you excellent ideas. Read one a month and you will gain many insights in a year. Watch documentaries featuring successful people. Listen to motivating or educational audiotapes when driving, walking or exercising.
You Are Involved In A Tremendous Learning Experience
Life is a learning experience. The learning never stops. You can keep learning constantly to refine your habits. You can always reach for a higher level, no matter where you are now. You will become more as a person and you will have more to offer.
In “The Power of Focus,” by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, and Les Hewitt, you will find something called “The Successful Habits Formula.” It consists of three steps to help you create better habits.
1. Clearly Identify Your Bad or Unproductive Habits
You must consider the long-term implications of your bad habits. Be totally honest. Your life might be at stake. For example, if you smoke ten cigarettes a day for 20 years, that’s 73,000 cigarettes. Would those perhaps have a negative impact on your health?
2. Define Your New Successful Habit
Usually your replacement habit is just the opposite of the bad habit. For example, in the case of cigarettes, the new habit would be “stop smoking.” Create a clear picture of what the new habit will do. The more vividly you see the benefits, the more likely you are to take action.
3. Create A Three-part Action Plan
Once you have made the commitment to change, you need to decide which specific actions you will use. Pick some optional behavior that you can use to help you replace the old habit with a new one.
Focus on three immediate action steps you can take to change your habit. When you start, select the one habit that you most want to change. Practice your action steps. Remember, you must make the first change.
If you can search out and replace your negative habits, you will find improvement in both your personal life and your business life. Embracing positive beliefs will help you immensely on the road to success.
Start right away building a library of inspirational books with lessons that will help you on your road to success. For your first addition to this new library, you can purchase The Power of Focus by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, and Les Hewitt. Just click on the blue book title below or the book image and you will be taken to Amazon, where you can purchase it.
Please note, that as an Amazon affiliate I may earn a small commission from your purchase.
If you have comments you would like to make about this article, please add them in the section provided at the end of this post. I would love to hear your ideas on this subject.
by Vintage/Ebury (A Division of Random)
Price: Paperback from $2.41
Hardcover $53.48
Before I start my studies in medical school, I had so many bad habits like playing video games for so many hours non-stop, at first I had no idea how to get rid of these bad habits and change myself I struggled a lot with it, by the time I learned that I need to put rules kind of thing like to be Commitment with what I want to do in my case changing to a better person. So I agree with your post Consistency, Commitment and believing in positive things and in myself can be a huge impact on our life. Thank you for this amazing post about such an important topic people need to read and I enjoyed reading The Successful Habits Formula, I loved your way of teaching us with this detailed article to how to be successful and better.
Thank you again and looking forward to reading more posts.
Mohammad
Thanks for your comment, Mohammed. It appears to me that you have learned something very valuable, in that you were able to change what you needed to change to get through school. That lesson can be applied to many things. I hope you will find it useful when applied to your online business.
They say successful people have successful habits while unsuccessful people have unsuccessful habits. One would think that knowing this everyone should strive to have successful habits so we can all be successful. There lies the problem as many people are not able to consistently emulate successful habits.
It would take a lot of determination if we are to change our habits and start living and emulating the habits of successful people.
It does take a lot of determination to change our habits. The first thing we need to do is to determine which habits are undermining our success. Those negative or time-wasting habits should be changed to help us improve.
If we truly want to succeed, we can develop the determination we need to make changes in our habits. It is up to us. If we don’t make some changes, our chances for success are lower.
This is an amazing article. Only in my wildest dreams could I have thought there would be so much information on habits.
I know through reading this I have identified some of my good and bad habits.
As a person who truly wants to be successful in everything in life I now realize that journey is going to take some work in the habit department.
Thank you for a great article that will not only help me but has the potential to help several others.
Dale
So glad the article was helpful. There are many good ideas in that book. There is one in there that I want to try. You make a time-log…for about four days, write down in a notebook everything you did for the last 15 minutes. When you have finished this project, you will know a tremendous amount about how you are spending your time.
I’d like to think that people will read the post and then work on eliminating some bad habits.
I so much agree with the “consistency is important” point. One of the keys to success in any field is to develop consistency. Consistency in thoughts and actions. It’s one of the most important lessons I learned this year. If you apply the principle of consistency to your in what you are doing, you’ll find it has the power to take you to the next level of success that you are seeking with your work. I’ve heard a lot about the “The power of focus” by Canfield and Hansen, it’s high time i got the book.
Regards.
It is a great book,Jordan. You are so right about consistency. If you stay focused on your goal, and keep working for it, you will develop consistency as part of the process.
There is a lot more good information in the book, “The Power of Focus.” I recommend it.
Hi! Very interesting read! Our habits today say a lot of what we will be tomorrow. How important it’s to reinforce good habits and to slash bad ones.
And I can’t agree more with you concerning consistency. Yes, so many of us dabble when it comes to changing bad habits. And the only way to walk towards success is to stop doing the things that negatively impact us and consistently do those that help us.
I found useful you mentioned the 21 days to change or develop a habit. And if habits have been with us for a long time, it may take even more than three or four weeks. But it’s interesting to break it down into measurable time frames. Thanks!
Glad you found the post interesting. Yes, consistency is so important. If we do well one day and sluff off for the next couple, we’ve lost our momentum and our advantage. It’s important to do the good things over and over again.
Determining the best habits for success is an endeavor well worth the time and effort, as you will find that you can get more done in less time and most likely do everything to a higher standard as well. Getting to know which of those desirable habits you can work on will help get you to that point quicker.
The book that you have reviewed seems like a very good means to go through this quickly. The authors of The Power Of Focus have put together a recipe for success and I look forward to getting a copy to read more. I did have a look at the reviews and it has a very good rating.
Thanks for the advice and the book recommendation, they will help me get started towards improving my work and living habits today. I do want to take action on this, as I know that there is always room for improvement for all of us. Staying abreast of what is working now is important as is self-evaluation.
You see the value of what the book teaches. Do get a copy. It will be a good addition to your inspiring and educational books.
Now change that “want to take action” into “take action” and you will be on your way.
Wonderful article Fran. Your habits completely dictate your level of success, mediocrity, or failure in life. Bad habits creep up on you too, it can start as seemingly innocuous and then turn worse unless you can stop it.
I have not read the book “The Power of Focus” but will look into this. I’m sure its a good one. I’ve read other books such as “Wishcraft” (Barbara Sher) and “Getting Things Done (David Allen) on how to change your habits from bad to good.
I think you would find great value in “The Power of Focus”, Kaju. I’ll look into the two you suggested. Thanks! I always like to find another motivational book that someone recommendes.