How to build good habits to improve your life

What are the habits of highly successful people?

What kind of attitude and habits, or mode of work, should a worker take in order to achieve a bright result in the workplace? Fortune, The New York Times organize 5 best ways in the workplace.

1. Develop a good habit of “getting up early”

The common denominator of successful people is “getting up early” and doing a lot of things while others are still in bed. Former U.S. President Barack Obama sleeps less than 5 hours a day and is accustomed to thinking about state affairs in the morning and exercising for 45 minutes.

Virgin Group founder Richard Branson is accustomed to getting up at 5 o’clock in the morning. Then, eating a delicious breakfast, sports and so on. He thinks that finishing these things early can help him to greet a new day with a better mood.

2. Figure out the goal and direction, and manage your life well.

If you are not clear about the exact purpose and direction of life, then you should start looking for meaningful things and devise a way to manage your life. Once the clues are found, the future life will be much clearer.

3. Learn to ask “right questions”.

“Questioning” is a profound knowledge. Asking the right question represents the questioner think through before asking. Ask the wrong question representative the questioner may not have done his homework. How do you ask the right question? How to effectively use the problem to break the deadlock and achieve the results of mutual benefit?

Making good use of questioning can create more turning points in the negotiation process. Each question is a new discovery that does not require a waste of time to argue with the other.

4. Take action

Whether you are new to the community or a veteran who has been rolling for years on the battlefield, keep in mind that “action decides everything.” There is no foolproof perfect plan. There is no help for success but enough decisive action is.

5. Learn “Effective communication”

If you want to reach a consensus with your supervisor, colleagues, friends or family, you must first learn how to communicate effectively. Effective communication can reduce misunderstanding, speed up negotiation speed and let things be done efficiently.

Source: http://www.cheers.com.tw/article/article.action?id=5087099

5 Expensive Habits will make you broke

1. Retail therapy
What are you going to do with a glorious weekend’s worth of free time? If the first thing that crosses your mind is “shopping”, you’ve got a bad habit you need to break.

2. Forgetting to pay your bills
When you fail to pay your credit card bills in full, you get slapped with very high interest that can make your initial sum quickly bloat beyond recognition. If you don’t manage to pay even the minimum sum, you also get hit with a late payment charge.

3. Getting too little sleep
On any given day, we make many poor decisions. And most of these poor decisions are the result of stress and fatigue.
A lot of unnecessary stress can be avoided by adhering to a strict bedtime and practising good sleep hygiene.

4. Poor time management
Improving your level of time management often leads to cost-savings. Making a meal plan and streamlining your grocery shopping process can save you from having to eat out every day, and working efficiently.

5. Continuing to pay for subscriptions you no longer use
If you have any memberships or subscriptions you’re under-utilising, do yourself a favour and cancel them. You’ll instantly save money each and every month, while undergoing zero lifestyle changes.

Anyone who claims they have no bad habits is lying, or at a job interview. We’ve all got some nasty little habits we’d rather nobody knew about.

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6 ways to change bad habit – Smart Change

A. Know Yourself

We need to know ourselves before we decide what to change. So we can take two weeks to observe carefully what needs to change and then record it.

These records need to include the timing of these habits, the circumstances in which they occur, and the state of our hearts as they occur. Then we need to look for patterns of bad habits from these records and use them to guard ourselves.

B. Establishing a positive goal

Because it’s hard for our brain to “stop” bad habits, so when we want to change a habit, we should establish positive goals to replace these bad habits.

For example, to stop checking emails at work, we should not force ourselves to remember not to “check email”. Instead, we can stipulate that we need to focus on writing reports within 30 minutes. That way, we won’t be checking emails for 30 minutes.

C. Controlling the environment

Because our behavior is affected by the environment, we can make the good habits that we want to develop in the environment easy to implement, so that the old bad habits become difficult to implement.

If you want to change the bad habit of “keep checking email”, we can turn off the email program for a while and even turn the phone into a flight mode. In this way, during that time, we will not be interrupted by email and also minimizing the desire to check email.

D. Searching for like-minded people

It is admirable to strive alone, but it is easier to succeed with support. Therefore, to change bad habits, it is best to find a group of friends who want to change the same habit and strive together.

With like-minded people, not only we can encourage each other and let us have the strength to continue, but also we can get a lot of good advice from them and learn how they develop new habits.

E. Proactive

We are waiting for the right time to begin to change most of the time. But winners never wait for tomorrow. Whey find that they need to change their habits, they will act immediately. Because success is not achieved by a single step, but by accumulating small progress every day.

Mark Twain: A habit cannot be tossed out the window; it must be coaxed down the stairs a step at a time.

F. Treat yourself well

Even if we try, it is inevitable that we will encounter many setbacks before we succeed. Every successful writer has the experience of being rejected, and every successful athlete will have a failure. Therefore, we should consider failure as an opportunity to learn something new, rather than a pretext for refusing to try.

Therefore, during failure, we do not need to criticize ourselves too hard. As long as we find out where we can improve and continue to try, there will always be a successful day!

Sources:

http://www.startuplatte.com/2017/12/14/smart-change/

http://www.dailygood.org/story/1243/six-ways-to-help-people-change-art-markman/

What you need is to build habits, not to find a resolution.

Habits are naturally brain-friendly, learned behaviors.

You can do them quickly without thinking because they reside in your unconscious — once you get the hang of them. Habits help you preserve energy for heavy-duty thinking, including decision making.

You can learn the skill of building habits.

Because the habit is now automatic, you don’t need to expend energy or working memory from your prefrontal cortex “also referred to as the executive” to remember to do the behavior.

Resolutions are big, bold actions that depend on motivation. habits are automatic routines that already make up 40% of your daily activity, according to Dr. Wendy Wood, Provost Professor of Psychology and Business at the University of Southern California.

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21 days to form habits

In behavioral psychology, the formation and consolidation of a person’s new habit or new ideas can take at least 21 days. A person’s action or idea, if repeated 21 days, becomes a habitual action or idea, called a “21-day effect”.

After a lot of practical examples, most people can form or develop a habit in 21 days. Although the process may have been the exhaustion of the persistence period and the difficult transition period, people can do it ultimately.

The formation of habit is roughly divided into three stages.

The first stage: around 1-7 days. This stage is characterized by “deliberate and unnatural” and requires a very deliberate reminder to yourself.

Because if you don’t pay attention, your bad feelings and bad habits will surface and bring you back to the past status. You may feel unnatural and uncomfortable while reminding yourself and asking yourself, however, this “unnatural and uncomfortable” is normal.

The second stage: around 7-21 days. This stage is manifested as “deliberate and natural”, but it still requires conscious control.

After a week of deliberate requirements, you feel more natural and comfortable. But you cannot be careless. Your bad mood and bad habits will come again to destroy you and break your habit development. So, you have to deliberately remind yourself.

The third stage: 21-90 days or so. This stage is manifested as “casual and natural” without conscious control.

This is a period of habitual stability that makes new habits a part of your life. At this stage, you don’t have to remind yourself. It’s as natural as the way you lift your watch.

So we know that the goal is to stick to 21 days, a new good habit will be developed, and 21 days will change your whole life. The question is, how do we stick to 21 days?

The key is not to forget your habit because you will give up if you forget to action a few times. So how do we not to forget?

1. Set the alarm in your phone to remind yourself the things that you need to do every day.

2. Link between the habit and the every day’s task. For example, taking a shower is your every day’s task. You can form a habit to do something before taking shower. You will never forget to do that thing in this way.

Sources:

https://kknews.cc/news/v94yblq.html

http://madchu.com/?p=3918

6 extra tips for dating habits

1. BE OPEN AND HONEST EVEN WHEN LYING WOULD BE LESS PAINFUL/AWKWARD.
Lying full-time time job and a serious commitment. One slip-up can ruin any trust you built in the relationship and it’s simply not worth it. Don’t embellish to try and impress a guy because eventually the truth will come up and a relationship built on falsities is bound to crash.

2. BROADEN YOUR HORIZONS AND GET OUT OF YOUR COMFORT ZONE.
Don’t be afraid to try new things or give chances to someone who isn’t quite your “type”. The reason for previous romantic fails could be because what you need isn’t exactly what you’ve been looking for.

3. SAY “YES” MORE.
Yes to going on a date with the nice guy at the desk over who isn’t totally your type. Yes to getting coffee with the kinda nerdy type you met at the bookstore.

4. DON’T WASTE YOUR TIME ON THE WRONG ONES.
If the chemistry isn’t there, bail. If you don’t see a future, end it. If he treats you terribly but he’s really cute, realize your worth. These dead end relationships are a waste of time and could be keeping you from finding him.

5. STOP IGNORING RED FLAGS.
If you see he’s a liar or a player and think he’ll change, he probably won’t. And those little habits you can’t stand now will only get more annoying with time.

6. NO MATTER HOW TEMPTING IT IS, DO NOT SETTLE.
Being single is better than being with the wrong person. Focus on you. Become happy being your own soul mate. Take yourself out on dates.

Delete Mr. Lost Cause from your contact list and start living by these dating rules. Drop the bad habits and start fresh.

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Further reading: Focus On What You Can Control