Summary
You are the sum of what you do. Not what you do occasionally or twice a year, but what you do over and over again. I firmly believe that the habits you set for yourself each day are what most fundamentally determine what kind of person you’re going to be.
Just as in training dogs, the key to training yourself to obtain habits of success is consistency. We may have some learned and deeply rooted behaviors that we need to remove from our mindset, but it is absolutely possible to change yourself if you focus on making progress each day where you can.
Read on to learn more on how you can train yourself to achieve much more than rolling over.
Transcript
I don’t make it out to the theater as often as I would like, but I recently went to a very funny play that made me really think.
The show was sent in the 1960s and told the story of a newlywed couple settling into their lives together. Everything was initially rosy in that sweet honeymoon period, at least at first. But months went by, normalcy set in, and slowly signs of discontent began to creep into how they related with each other. The relationship stopped being novel and exciting. They began to have to deal squarely with all of the minutia that comes with adult life; laundry, cooking, chores, commuting. The shine began to wear off.
At one point, the wife’s mother stops by the house for a visit. They’re catching up when suddenly the daughter bursts into tears. The mother is startled and asks her daughter what the problem is.
“It’s not working,” she replies. The marriage wasn’t working. Her mother listened to her recount it all; how the thrill has worn off, how they are grating on each other’s nerves, how nothing seems as magical as it all did on their wedding day. Her mother assured her that she was all too familiar with what she meant; she had been married herself, after all. With that, she pulled a book from her purse and handed it to her daughter. The book was titled “How to Train Your Dog”.
The mother instructed her to follow the directions carefully, using each of the author’s techniques to train her husband. The daughter is skeptical, but agrees to give the book a shot. After all, what does she have to lose? She’s amazed to find herself actually turning the marriage around. As she is training each technique, thing just start getting better. The couple is soon happier than they have ever been.
The irony, we come to find, is that the wife has actually trained herself just as much as she has trained her spouse.
Consistency Is Key To Success
I bring this up because it reminds me of the truism that training a dog is all about consistent repetition. The same concept applies to all of us. We ultimately form our habits of success or failure by repeating the same behavior over and over again, without even thinking, while taking action and creating the correct mindset to create habits, either positive or negative.
You are the sum results of your habits. Having a salad once in a blue moon or putting in a hard day of work occasionally does not create a consistent trend or pattern. It’s not the special occasions or one-offs that define you, but the activities and habits that you do over and over again.
If you have children, be sure to cultivate good study and productivity habits in them from an early age. Habits and values instilled early in life are hard to break, so make sure they are good ones from the get-go and you will set them up for continued success. Get them to eat vegetables as well. I worked at this with my young kids. I even got my son to eat broccoli by getting him to pretend he was eating trees, like one of those “chippers” or tree-eating-machines.
One of the primary reasons that I hear from people for why they don’t set constructive and positive habits is that they can’t keep them going. They do them once, like waking up before work to hit the gym, but can’t find the willpower to keep going.
I would suggest that you need to give yourself a bit of time. It can take a few weeks on average for a new habit to really sink in as a new part of your routine, so be patient with yourself. This also goes for seeing results. A lot of people give up on their exercise or personal finance routine because they aren’t seeing their behaviors pay off in any tangible way compared to what they receive for just giving into their usual desires and habits. But the obvious take-away should be that the only way to make something a habit is to simply keep at it. If you fall off the wagon or have a cheat day, don’t let it be an excuse to give up altogether either. You can make this process much much easier by creating and using PPMs, Personal Programing Messages, as I have outlined in my book and course material.
Track Your Progress
It also helps to track what you want to accomplish with clear metrics. Whatever your goal is, setting an objective will allow you to feel a sense of pride in meeting it and allow you to track that you have been successful. There are few feelings as good as the sense of taking control of your day and checking off the box for meeting a goal. So each day, set out to hit a number of words written if you are writing a book, (or just do it in a weekend, as I have outlined) or a number of steps taken if you are trying to lose weight, or a set amount of money to save if you are blazing your path toward financial independence. Simply put, what gets measured is what gets done.
Create Conditions For Success
Also set yourself up for success by making your conditions as optimal as possible for the habit you are looking to set. If you are focused on health related outcomes, you could try going to sleep at night in your gym clothes so that you are so much closer to ready for your workout when you wake up in the morning. You might also want to consider not buying any sugary sweets at the grocery store so that you don’t have them in your kitchen just waiting to tempt you. If you are focused on a business goal, make it easier on yourself by making your home office a friendly and appealing place to spend time, so that you don’t make a negative mental association with the time that you spend in that room banging out work.
Also make incremental changes to your routine rather than attempting an overtly ambitious major shift all at once. So don’t start waking up three hours early to get things done, gradually increase your waking up time in 20-minute intervals over time until eventually you think nothing of waking up much earlier. That said, some people prefer to fully jump-in, and if that’s your style, go for it!
You can also find everyday parts of your routine that you can use to set better habits. An obvious example is in walking and fitness. Get out of the habit of parking as close as possible to your destination and instead see parking as another chance to fit more steps into your day and live a healthier lifestyle. I think that you will thank yourself later down the line.
Clarity Brings Results
I suggest starting out by listing what it is you really hope to change about yourself or what problem you are looking to solve in your life. Having clarity on what your priorities are will help you to identify and set new habits, while also allowing you to envision a future that you are working toward and that can keep you motivated over the long haul. I also encourage you to identify those parts of your day that you are most likely to be able to carve out new chunks of time to focus on your goals. For many of us, they tend to be in the morning, during lunch, or in the evening. It may depend on whether you are a morning or night person perhaps, but figure it out and work in your new goals accordingly.
I want to leave you with this. You can train yourself to do or be just about anything. For some it comes more quickly, but that doesn’t matter. This race you are in is a marathon, not a sprint. You can be moving toward a better life and lifestyle every day with focus and purpose. And when you look back, even just a few months from now, you will be amazed at how far you have come.
You can also learn more by visiting my website: tonyneumeyer.com and registering to receive free trainings articles and more. Also subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me on Facebook. You can get your copy of The 7 Minute Millionaire and check out my other books at https://tonyneumeyer.com/books/.
