Building New Habits – Develop Self-Disciplines

Habit is a repeat performance of our behavior on any given day or time. In a simple term, Habit is nothing but automating your practice. We do it knowingly or unknowingly. If you can pick up something that is helpful for you and make it into a routine habit – there is nothing can be better than this. As much as you focus on building on new habits, you also need to make sure you are letting your bad habit goes.

Quality is not an act, it is a habit. – Aristotle

How? You can start building a new habit or can change the existing one with self-disciplined and regular efforts. But, before that, you should know How habit works? It is essential to understand How your current habits works and they get a deep inside to build a new habit and change the existing one. Creating new habits is an essential for self-discipline, productivity, good health, your happiness, and in general, for your life and family.

Winning is habit. Unfortunately, so is losing – Vince Lombardi

How does habit work?

From the book –  The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Businesseach habit has three components, or it’s a three steps process.

• Cue
• Routine
• Rewards

A trigger point to start the behavior – Called as Cue. Then the routine, which is the behavior itself. Finally, the rewards which make this method worth remembering for future and causes instinct the process again.

Over the time, the habit Loop, “Cue – Routine – Reward, Cue – Routine – Reward, Cue – Routine – Reward. “becomes more and more automatic. The is applicable for almost everything we do as per habit.

Consider a habit of checking phone on every single time when it vibrates. Yes! Most of the time we do it as part of our practice. As soon as your phone vibrates, a cue triggers and automatic routine of swipe through phone, check all notification and as a reward a feeling of accomplishment by responding someone, or reading some jokes or replying someone. But, is it worth of doing now? – that’s where your habit is coming into the picture, and before even you think, the automatic mode turns on as soon as there is vibrates or notification.

Building a new habit

To build a new habit, you must understand the habit loop first and then identify the elements Cue, Routine, and Reward for the behavior. First, decide to act on the task, take a slow step and then make it in a reparative action.

Over the period, I developed a habit of daily morning jogging. Decide to arise early morning – set the alarm clock to a particular time, get up immediately from the bed, put up my jogging dress and go out. Yes! I am doing it regularly. To understand your new habits, you need to identify the components of your loops, and I identified that get up early, go for jogging and sense of achievement and self-disciplined.

Related Post:  Keep Motivate Yourself by Self Reward

It’s is not easy to make it in habit or not a difficult as well. Step by step actions, self-disciplined and following the procedure would make this happen. Eventually, now, I don’t need any alarm clock to wake up in the morning – It’s automatic for me. An almost similar time I woke up daily – be it weekday or weekend, and continue with the routine. As the reward, I found myself a tremendously energetic, full day, a sense of achievement, active mind and moreover, self-disciplined.

Respect your efforts, respect yourself. Self-respect leads to self-discipline. When you have both firmly under your belt, that’s real power – Clint Eastwood

From my personal experience here are some tips for creating new having and stick with it.

• Start with small steps
• Make it daily – Don’t allow any exception
• Be motivated about reward
• Set target for weekly, monthly and review it – Reward yourself if you achieve your targets.
• Make yourself accountable if fails.
• Visualize the rewards

Changing old habits

How can we get rid of bad habits? You can’t throw your bad habits. But you can change it by replacing with a new routine. Changing a habit is simple: keep the same cue and reward, but change the routine. Then, make the new routine as part of new habit loop.

From the Power of Habit – Changing a habit might not be fast, and it isn’t always easy as building a new one.

But with time, effort, self-disciplined almost any habit can be changed.

Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired – Jules Renard

All the habits are patterns and vary individual to individual. Cue, Routine, and Reward could be different for everyone. From the book – Power of Habits by Charles Duhigg, Individuals and habits are all different, and so the specifics of diagnosing and changing the patterns in our lives differ from person to person and behavior to behavior. Giving up cigarettes is different than curbing overeating, which is different from changing how you communicate with your spouse, which is different from how you prioritize tasks at work. What’s more, each person’s habits are driven by different cravings

Must Read: Plan Your Day Effectively – Work Faster, More Efficiently and Achieve More

Reference

Habits are very powerful. Habits could be good or bad, and you can build your new habit or even reshaped your existing habits. Not only in the individual level, In the book, Charles Duhigg, also detailed about habits of organizations, and societies, more over the research behind them. In the book, author Charles Duhigg, summarize the framework to build or reshaped your habits.
The Framework:

• Identify the routine
• Experiment with rewards
• Isolate the cue
• Have a plan

Read More about – How Habits Work
This is an excellent book, and I would highly recommend reading for yourself.

 The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

Read this book, and there are several other great articles on building habits, do refer them as well.  I developed several habits over years – be it daily goal settings, maintain todo list, prioritize work, spending less time over social networks, always clean up my home office desk, etc. but I was not aware of about the science behind it, for me it was more like practice and self-discipline.

This book helps me to understand the science behind the habits and – why we do what we do and how to change it!  As the cover page of the book says -“Absolutely fascinating” – I must say this is true and because of that I writing this post as well. I am now more confident on building more new habits and improving some of my existing! Build great habits – work more productively, think more efficiently, to make better decision, to become more self-disciplined

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