Habits and Goals Together
You might be wondering what you’re supposed to do if you want to change certain habits but you really haven’t given any thought to whether or not they attach to goals you have. What if you just know that you procrastinate too much and that’s a habit you’d like to stop? Is the desire to change that bad habit attached to any sort of goal?
I’d argue that that absolutely is attached to goals you have. Procrastination is a bad habit. It’s preventing you from earning more money. It’s harming your business or stopping you from getting raises and promotions. It’s harming your reputation and it’s making it harder for you to be happy with your own performance.
Habits don’t exist in a vacuum. You don’t like them or despise them for their own sake. When you examine them further, it becomes a lot clearer why you really want to change them. There are clear, measurable goals inside you that you need to pull out and understand, so you can understand your habits.
You want to stop procrastinating so you can earn more money (how much?). You want to stop procrastinating so you actually have more time left over at the end of a workday to do the things you enjoy doing (what do you enjoy?). You want to stop procrastinating to gain more respect among your peers (who and why and what does that entail?) Keep asking yourself why? Why? Why? To get to the heart of your goals.
You want to change your habits because you have certain goals. You need to identify both your habits and your goals so you can successfully do that. After you identify what you want and how you’re going to get there, visualization can help you turn your goals into reality.
Do You Believe You Can Do It?
The fact is that you have a certain set of beliefs about yourself right now. You either believe you can do something or believe you can’t do something. Do you believe you can achieve your goals? Do you think you can change those bad habits?
It’s hard to believe in yourself if you’ve tried and failed dozens of times in the past unless something else changes to give you a reason to think that things will be different this time. Maybe reading this will be that catalyst.
In fact, there are few things more soul crushing. It’s especially hard if you’ve announced to other people that you’re going to make a huge effort to change something about yourself and then they see that you’ve failed, yet again. Believe me, I had to live with others’ doubts that I could dig my family out of debt and into financial freedom, way back when. It wasn’t the first time one of my “wild” ideas took hold in my mind.
The difference that time, the time that I changed my habits and found success, was that I wasn’t going to allow the thought of failure to overtake me. I was going to break my habits and goals down in a way that made success inevitable. I studied those who were very successful. Self-improvement gurus became my gurus. I wanted to know how they did it. I was particularly interested in those who’d come from similar backgrounds to my own. I wanted to know that there was nothing standing in my way but myself— there’s comfort in that.
And then one fateful day, after I had found someone who was doing what I could do, and succeeding with those skills, I decided “if he can do that, I can do that”, and set about building habits and systems to do just that.
When you know that you’re really the only thing holding you back, it’s so much easier to move forward. That’s because you can find and make your own success, no matter who you are or what you’re doing right now. You can use visualization to pull yourself past any barriers your mind tries to set up for you. That’s usually what happens, by the way. Your mind puts these roadblocks up that make you feel like you can’t and won’t succeed.
In the beginning of a goal-setting session, it’s a lot easier to believe you’ll succeed. There’s something about those precious early days when you decide to chase after your goals— it seems that the world is open to you. But then reality sets in and things get a lot harder to deal with. Doubt after doubt piles up until you abandon habit change and achieving your goal altogether. “Can I really do this? I was silly to think I could!”
That’s why you have to find a way to stay strong. The doubts that pile up are the storms and the bugs and the weeds that are trying to destroy that little seed of positive habit you planted. That fertilizer— visualization— is what’s going to keep your seed strong enough so that it can grow big enough with roots deep enough that it will never be knocked down, no matter how many doubts come your way.
Visualizing your success as you’re trying to achieve will help kick those doubts to the curb. It also keeps your positive habits and the goals you’re trying to achieve firmly in your mind. It’s so easy to lose your way. It’s easy to forget what you’re trying to achieve and why. But when you make visualization a daily part of your achievement, you’ll be a lot more likely to push through and find success.
The irony is that daily visualization is a habit in and of itself. This may be the first habit you attempt to establish before you try to layer any others. You should make it part of your daily ritual to visualize yourself participating in positive habits and achieving the goals you want to achieve. Soon enough, it will just be part of your daily routine, like brushing your teeth.
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