H Is For Habits
Habits are defined as routines of behavior that are repeated regularly and tend to occur subconsciously.
But what’s that got to do with marketing our business?
Habits are defined as routines of behavior that are repeated regularly and tend to occur subconsciously.
It was Jim Rohn who said; ‘Work harder on yourself than you do on your business’, because it is what you do and how you do it that will determine your success.
Working on ourselves by developing habits that lead us to do the right things for our business – is good for our results. But first we need to know what are the right things to do. After all, there are only 24 hours in the day and we’re probably already using 25 of them.
Cutting down the number of things you have to do by choosing to do only those which deliver the biggest and best results is probably the most important. And for that you need an overall strategic plan for your business so that you know for sure what are the most important things you need to achieve.
Once you have a strategy then you can fill in the blanks, the tactics, the details. But if you spend all your time on details then you can spend a lifetime working your way up a blind alley – because you never bothered to lift your head to see where you were going.
So, we’ve established that doing the right things is important. But we all know how easy it is to become distracted. And that is precisely why we need to develop the habit of doing the right things for our business.
Habitual behavior goes unnoticed because you don’t need to think about it. Whatever you are doing is achieved effectively and in minimum time and with minimum effort – leaving you with more time and energy to deal with all the other things that crop up during the course of the day. So good work habits are a good thing.
Habituation is an extremely simple form of learning, in which an organism, after a period of exposure to a stimulus, stops responding to that stimulus in varied manners. In other words, you start to respond in a consistent way and to get it right first time. And getting it right first time is one of the greatest time savers ever.
To make sure you do what you need to do for your business
- Know what you have to do – from your strategic plan.
- Develop a checklist to guide you methodically through the process. By repeatedly doing things in the same way you are simply teaching yourself to work effectively – and it becomes a habit.
- Allocate time for your ‘must do’ activities. This gives you a chance to actually get it done.
The principles of success have been the basis of mountains of ‘self development’ books, training and courses which gets bigger though not necessarily better every day. And habits are a constant theme running through pretty well all of them.
Among the best know is Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Successful People and Napoleon Hill’s ‘Think and Grow Rich’ encapsulates 23 years of research to find out what were the same things that successful people did. Putting it another way, did they all have the same habits.
Old habits are hard to break and new habits are hard to form because the behavioural patterns we repeat are imprinted in our neural pathways. But the value of getting rid of old bad habits and developing good, new habits is enormous and can only be good for your business success.
