Brain Training For Success – Lesson 3.2 – Form Empowering Habits To Create The Life You Desire

Welcome to Lesson #15 of the Brain Training for Success course!

When you intend to do something, the likelihood of getting it done goes up dramatically.

Knowing your intentions is key, and forming habits to encourage those intentions only makes sense.

Your life becomes what you consistently do, which is why this lesson focuses on habits.

How You Go About Your Daily Life Ultimately Determines The Life You Live

Think about it – if you eat more than your share of high unsaturated fats, high sugar foods, and spend your spare time watching television, you’re creating the life of a sedentary person who carries at least a bit of extra weight and has a sparse social life.

On the other hand, if your daily life is filled with healthy choices and activities you do each day, it stands to reason that you’re a healthier, more active person.

Applying this idea further, if you don’t choose to do your own homework regarding your work or career, you might be the type of person who just does what they have to do to get by at work.

After all, you’ve got other things you’d rather do like watch sports on television or hang out with your friends.

If you’re interested in advancing your career, you probably spend at least some time daily engaging in reading, tasks, projects, and activities that focus on your career development.

The results of your behaviours most likely are that you’re high-achieving in your work, well-respected at the office, and have done quite well in your career.

How can you fill your life engaging in activities with people and study that bring richness and fulfillment to you? How can you create the life you truly desire?

The answer?

Form empowering habits that ensure you live the life you seek.

What Is So Important About Forming Habits?

When you think about it, your life is all about the habits you have.

1. Your habits = your life. What you do every single day over and over again combines, over time, to become the very foundation of your life.
2. Habits are automatic behaviours. When you develop a habit, it takes that action out of the realm of having to make a conscious choice every time you do it. You don’t have to think about it or make yourself do something once it’s a habit. You just do it automatically.
3. Habits can be empowering or inhibiting and even unhealthy. This same information applies to both forming empowering, positive habits that help you get what you want or negative habits that hold you back from fulfilling your potential.
4. Positive habits create the life you want. If you form positive habits, you’re more likely to enjoy the riches and fulfillment of the good life you want.

Your habits are the most basic elements of your life. Whether you look at your day-to-day routines or your overall life, it’s made up of all the behaviours you do.

Those actions practised consistently are your habits. If you establish positive empowering habits, you’ll live the life of your dreams.

“I never could have done what I have done without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one subject at a time.”

(Charles Dickens)

The Science Of Habit Development

Over the years, you might have read a lot about how long it takes to develop a habit from repeating new positive behaviours that you exhibit.

If you ask around or even search the internet, you’ll hear that it takes anywhere from 10 to 28 days to establish a habit.

However, some new research by Phillippa Lally and others at University College London has truly shed light on the science behind habit development.

Take a look at some of Lally and her fellow researchers’ findings and some additional suggestions based on the research:

1. A behaviour must be repeated 66 times consecutively before it forms a habit. If you’ve ever tried to establish a habit by performing a behaviour every day for say, 14 or 21 days, it probably didn’t work because you didn’t do the behaviour enough times in a row in order to successfully develop the habit.
2. Repeat the behaviours in the same setting/situation. You’re more likely to form a habit when you keep doing a behaviour in the same place and/or situation. Where you are affects habit formation.

   The researchers determined that where you are whenever you’re trying to form a habit has something to do with how successful you’ll be. In essence, if you’re in the same place when you’re doing the new behaviour over and over, you’re more likely to successfully form a habit.

3. Forming a new habit is “cue-dependent.” Whether you form a habit depends somewhat on cues in your environment and behaviours. There are two types of such cues, according to Lally and the other researchers: situational and contextual.

   

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