Advanced Strategies for Habit Formation

What if you're tackling something as ambitious as managing diabetes or transforming your dead-end dating history?

These ideas will give you an extra boost:

1. Practice compassion. 

You're bound to slip up occasionally. Forgive yourself, and move forward.

2. Team up. 

Enlist a friend so you can exchange support and encouragement. Eat lunch with a colleague who is trying to lose weight too.

3. Write it down. 

Raise your awareness by keeping a journal about your campaign to stop swearing or start flossing. Note what happens on the days you stick to your program compared to the days when you drift back into old patterns.

4. Remove temptations. 

Eliminate the triggers that distract you from your objectives. Clear the junk food out of your kitchen or the cigarettes out of your car.

5. Design obstacles. 

Make it difficult to give in to your old tendencies. Leave your credit cards at home to prevent impulsive shopping sprees.

6. Go on vacation. 

Leave home for a while. Vacations are an ideal time to forge new habits because you can make a fresh start in different surroundings. Sit down to meditate each morning instead of becoming caught up in searching for lost socks or checking your email.

How To Form New Habits - Must Read

How many times have you heard that it takes just a few weeks to develop a new habit? The truth is a bit more complicated than that, but there are scientific ways to help you lock in the changes you want to make.

The myth about behaviour becoming automatic in 21 days started when journalists misinterpreted a popular self-help book on Psycho Cybernetics back in the 1960's. After all, you can probably eat more vegetables starting today, but complex tasks like playing the violin are going to take more than a month to gel.

On the other hand, now is an ideal time to begin forming constructive habits that will enhance your happiness and wellbeing. Take a look at these strategies for learning new behaviours.

Basic Strategies for Habit Formation

Try these tips for easing into your new routines as quickly as possible:

1. Plan ahead. Eliminate excuses by plotting out your course in advance. 

If you want to wake up an hour earlier, go to bed on time, and dream about the invigorating yoga class and delicious breakfast that await you in the morning.

2. Be consistent. 

Regularity reinforces itself. Pretty soon it will be easier to go to the gym after work rather than changing your mind, even if it's raining or your colleagues are heading out for beer and pizza.

3. Spot triggers. 

Kicking a habit requires you to notice what happens right before you bite your nails or buy another pair of shoes. Are you bored at work or arguing with your spouse?

4. Develop substitutions. 

Once you know your cues, you can choose a different response. Take a walk or invite a friend out for coffee.

5. Review your reasons. 

Go over the reasons why you want to adopt your new behaviour. Remind yourself about how drinking water instead of soda will help you slim down, strengthen your bones, and save money.

6. Personalize your goals. 

While you're contemplating your reasons, visualize your future self. Focus on what you have to gain instead of just pleasing others.

Make daily exercise and parallel parking so easy you won't even have to think about them. Positive habits make advantageous choices automatic so you'll stick with them. You'll also have more energy to devote to other challenges.

 To your success.

How To Create Your Day

When God created man, He equipped him with all the necessary tools for survival - spiritually, physically, psychologically and otherwise.

He gave man an injunction "Go ye and overcome" and in overcoming man is expected to use the creative ingenuity deposited in him to make his life better.

This is why even the Scriptures say that "as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he" and the popular maxims have them this way "man is the architect of his own fortunes or misfortunes as the case may be" and "as a man maketh his bed, so lieth he on it"

So after God created man, he was given the ability to also "create" in such a way as to make his own personal world a better one which can thus be transferred to the world outside.

Creating your day is one sure way of ensuring that you have a better personal world and then you will be able to give that out to the outer world since a man "cannot give what he does not have"

So how do you create your day?

When you wake up in the morning and stub your toe do you let it set the tone for the rest of the day?

Do you think..."Oh great, it's going to be one of those days?"

Do you let other people and events to trigger feelings of anger, frustration, impatience and more? 

When you do this you are actually creating a bad day, instead of creating a good one.

What you think will become your reality. Instead, try using intentions and visualization to create your day.

When you first wake up in the morning, spend a little time thinking about the types of things you would like to experience that day.  

How would you like your workday to go?  

What kind of people would you like to meet?  

Would you like to receive some great opportunities to advance your career or financial situation?  

How would you like to feel that day?

Now, grab a notebook and write them down!  

Once you've gotten all the details written down, spend a few minutes vividly imagining each scenario in your mind, exactly as you would like it to happen.  Imagination is such a powerful tool that it will take you from nowhere to somewhere higher than high

More importantly, you need to feel as if they were actually happening now.  

Immerse yourself in feelings of excitement, joy, happiness and gratitude as you imagine one great experience after another.  Sing your favourite song, exude inner joy and happiness

By the time you're finished you should be feeling fantastic! 

As your day continues take special care not to be attached to any specific events or experiences, just stay open to whatever comes.  

Keep affirming that great things are going to happen to you that day, and you feel great about all of the blessings and abundance in your life.

At the same time, avoid getting caught up in feelings of worry, anxiety, frustration, and anger throughout the day because those feelings will interfere with the positive energy you've already put out.

As often as you can, remember the images of the things you visualized earlier and allow good feelings to flow over you again. 

By using this process on a daily basis, you will start to notice that good things are starting to happen.  

You'll find yourself being in the right place at the right time and generally enjoying greater opportunities and abundance.

With much love to you

I am #DrJTF