“Excellence is not an act, it’s a habit,” and I will teach you a simple way to get rid of bad old habits and replace them with new ones
Aristotle said: ”We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is not an act, but a habit.” But this is easier said than done because we are creatures of habit and old habits die-hard. So how can we get rid of old habits and replace them with new ones?
The secret is in understanding how your brain functions, how it seeks pleasure, avoids pain and likes to do things in a very smart way… sometimes too smart for your own good!
So go ahead and click here if you want to find out a step-by-step system to get rid of old habits and even replace them with new productive ones; and don’t forget to share it around and spread the passion.
Live Passionately
Moustafa Hamwi
Passionpreneur & Chief Energy Officer
Award Winning Author
AKA The Passion Guy
Transcript
How to Get Rid of Old Habits that are Hindering your Success
Hello everyone and welcome back to Passion Sundays – the best way to end the week and start another.
Aristotle said, “We are what we do repeatedly. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit.” So if you really want a life full of success and passion, you want to develop habits that support that. And I will share with you today how to build new habits, because after all we are creatures of habit. We really like what we know, we really like what we are used to, and we do not like to disturb that. Do you know why? Simply because, the brain is very smart. Sometimes too smart for its own good!
Here are the steps that you want to follow to replace old habits with new habits that are beneficial to you. The first step is you have to make sure you define one habit that you want to get rid of. And why am I saying one habit? Everybody gets overexcited about changing so many things in their life they wake up on the end and they’re gonna go “I’m gonna change everything!’ and they put a list of a hundred things that they’re gonna do. Next day they’re excited, third day they’re still going to the gym, five days later, forget about it. I mean look at the New Year’s resolution, how many of you have actually put a New Year’s resolution versus how many have walk the talk past January. Probably most did not! Because we overload ourselves and we over expect a lot of things to be changed in our life and guess who’s gonna fight that? Your brain, because it wants to avoid the pain of new things and new learnings and new mistakes. It wants to seek the pleasure of what you know and the comfort and the security of what you know. And it wants to do things efficiently, and you’re never efficient when you’re learning a new habit. Get it? One…Only one habit. Now once you succeed in changing that, your mind will play ball with you and you’ll be able to change other habits as you progress.
Second step. You want to find a replacement habit. This is very, very, very important. You see, the world and the universe does not like vacuum. So if you take out a habit and you do not feel the gap with something else, the probability is you’ll gonna end up resolving to your old habits, and this is where most people are stuck.
Now I’m gonna give you a magic tool that will help your mind support you on the journey of moving from a bad habit to a new habit. First thing you want do is go ahead and grab a piece of paper and draw a line in the center. On the left side I want you to write down all the negative impact that is coming to your life because of this bad habit. Think smoking. Write, my clothes smell bad, I have a bad breath, my fingers smell bad. People really don’t like to hang out around me because of the smell. I have to step out either in the heat or in the cold to smoke when it’s not nice weather. And I’m losing a lot of money. And I did it around morning and just like that. The more you write, the more your mind starts seeing the negative aspects. On the other side of the sheet I want you to write the replacement habit and all the positive that will come into your life because of that habit. So let’s say every time you get the urge to smoke you say I’m gonna go for a jog. Even if it’s a 5-minute jog or I’m gonna do 10 push-ups. If you gonna say 10 push-ups, now 50 negatives. The 50 positives are…every time I do a push-up I build up better muscle. Every time I do a push up I have saved myself from smoking. Every time I do a push up I saved myself the price of a cigarette. And so on and so forth until you build that. Now remember the 3 mandates that I talked about? The mind wants to avoid pain which you have shown the mind 50 painful aspects of this old habit. The mind wants to see pleasure, you have shown your mind 50 positive aspects of the new habit. And it wants to do things in an efficient way. The mind does gonna go this is painful, this is better, both of them are infront of me, I’ll go for this. And this is what all the magic happens. Now remember, give yourself some time to progress on this journey. Because it’s not something that you can do overnight and habits take time to change. So do not be discouraged if you find yourself bouncing back because there’s resistance but that takes time but once you get into a new habit, your mind would love making changes.
The simplest way I could summarize this is think about new habits like new relationships. They’re a bit difficult at the beginning and sometimes annoying and a lot of times you feel you wanna quit on them, it’s holding on to these relationships that make these relationships work. And hopefully once you have a marriage with your new relationship, hopefully a positive one, you’ll never gonna leave for the rest of your life. You will only keep improving further and further…and that’s the way to build passionate habits!
So if you find this useful please go ahead and share it with our Passion community and share your opinion on this blog below. And if you’d like more tools, tips, techniques and things that I only share exclusively by email, go to Moustapha.com and subscribe to Passion Sundays newsletter. Until next episode, live passionately.
