Goals are wonderful. They can give our lives direction. And they can provide us with the motivation to take our skills to the next level. But in life, we don’t merely want to chase one goal after another. More importantly, we want to develop good habits. That’s because good habits are the foundation upon which we can build a great life.
For example, your goal may be to be able to run two miles with ease. That’s a great goal. And that goal can give your life some direction. For a period of time.
But once you’ve accomplished that goal, then what? To create a truly great life, you need to think “big picture.” You need to think beyond being able to run two miles with ease. So, what you really should be striving for is to have good overall health. And to have good health, you have to adopt good exercise and dietary habits.
To create good exercise habits, you may adopt the habit of setting your alarm 30 minutes earlier each morning. That way you have time each day for not just running, but for exercising generally. You also may decide to adopt a healthier diet. A good diet not only will support your ability to run, but it also will allow you to avoid illnesses and maintain a healthy weight. Of course, reaching your goal of running 2 miles with ease is great. But what’s far more important is to adopt habits for good overall health.
The good news is that with positive daily habits, you can create a foundation upon which you can build a wonderful life.
So, if you are seeking to create a great life, adopt great habits! Read below about how to change your life for the better, simply by adopting good habits!
Good Habits Are Ones that Can Be Sustained for the Long-Term
When we’re working toward a goal, we’re attacking it until we achieve it. It’s intense. The problem is that kind of intensity isn’t sustainable over the long-term.
By contrast, when we create good habits, we aren’t attacking a finite goal with intensity. Rather, we’re creating a way of life that will help us to be productive and happy for the long-term.
For instance, if you want to become fluent in a language, cramming for the occasional test will not create fluency. You’ll know what is necessary for the test, and then you’ll forget half of what you’ve learned a month later. To achieve fluency, the key is to make language learning your daily habit. That means reading, writing or speaking in that foreign language a little bit each day.
To achieve fluency, your language learning habit doesn’t need to be onerous. Rather, it needs to be sustainable. It needs to be a daily habit. That approach to language fluency can apply to any area of your life that you want to improve. The key to self-improvement is to work at it on a daily basis. Because when we incorporate an activity in our lives on a daily basis, it becomes part of who we are. And that is when fundamental positive personal change occurs.
So, build habits which allow for consistent productivity. Because when we do something consistently over time, that’s when life-long, positive change becomes possible.
Goals Measure Outcomes. Good Habits Measure Presence.
When we pursue goals, it’s easy to become frustrated because we measure our success by whether our precise goal was accomplished. “Did I lose 12 pounds?” “Did I get the job I applied for?”
The problem with goals is that they measure success by outcomes. Good outcomes are fine, but to have a great life, you want to measure your success by presence. Did you show up every day and try? Because long-term, “big picture” success is achieved only when we keep showing up, and we keep working hard.
So, if you are frustrated because you aren’t achieving specific goals, consider changing your metric. For instance, if your goal is to be healthy, don’t focus on finite goals. Don’t fret over the question, “Did I lose 1-2 pounds this week?” Rather, focus on whether you maintained good habits during the week. So, the better question to ask yourself is this: “Did I eat healthy foods and exercise for at least 3-4 days during the week?” Because good health is created only by good, long-term habits.
Remember that while goals are fine to be used as guideposts, your habits are what will allow you to create a life that is meaningful and productive. And if you commit to your adopting good, daily habits, you will have great long-term great results.
Attach Your New Habits to Existing Ones
Since we know that having good habits is critical to creating a good life, the question is then is this: “How do we go about implementing good habits in our lives?” Well, one good approach is to simply add new good habits onto your existing habits.
Believe it or not, you already have some good habits in place in your life. For instance, you presumably have adopted habits for good dental health. Those habits likely involve brushing your teeth every morning and every evening. Without fail.
So, the key is to figure out what habits you currently have and then add new ones onto those habits. For instance, I have a habit in which every evening I meditate for 10 minutes. Recently, I decided that I wanted to make my flexibility a priority. So, I tacked a new habit onto my old habit. Now, after my 10 minutes of nightly meditation, I stretch for 5 minutes to stay limber.
There are all kinds of ways to tack new habits onto currently existing ones. You can do a short meditation while waiting for your coffee to brew each morning. Or, you can read for 10 minutes after having lunch every day.
You might consider picking three habits that you already have. They could be brushing your teeth in the morning, having a cup of tea in the afternoon and eating dinner in the evening. To each habit, attach a new one. If you do, implementing new good habits will be so much easier!
Design Your Environment to Do the Work for You
Another way to implement good habits is to design your environment to support that habit. So, if you want to implement a habit of daily outdoor walking, make sure your walking shoes are by the front door. I have a habit of walking at least 8,000 – 10,000 steps a day. As a result, I’ve placed my walking shoes right on my walking pad. They are there and ready to go!
As another example, to be healthy, my husband and I are in the habit of eating fruit every afternoon as a snack. To maintain that habit, I have apples sitting on the kitchen counter. They are ready and visible. And as a result, I always remember to slice up two apples for us to snack on each day.
In addition to having an environment that supports your habits, you also want to have the right tools to implement your good habits. For instance, I find that it’s so much easier to have good health habits with the right gadgets. This past Christmas, my daughter bought me a Nutribullet so that I can have a healthy smoothie every morning for breakfast. And last year, I bought a walking pad to get in more steps each day. In my effort to be healthy, I find that having the right gadgets makes a big difference!
If you can design your environment and have the right gadgets to support your habits, implementing good habits becomes so much easier! So, give some mental energy to how you can engineer your home to support the good habits that you desire.
I encourage you to stop chasing goals. Yes, goals are helpful to give us direction. But to have a successful life, we need to create great habits. Follow the approaches above, implement habits that make your life truly work, and create an amazing life! (To read about 30 habits for happiness and better health, click here.)
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