Your daily routine influences your life’s direction and how confident you feel attracting success along that path. Having a routine of good habits each day puts you in the winning lane.
Key Takeaway – To transform your life and reach your potential:
- Nourish your body with healthy food and self-care
- Gain insight, practice gratitude
- Visualize goals and success through manifestation
- Keep active daily for body and mind energy
- Set positive intentions each day for productivity and positivity
To truly change your life you need to change your daily actions
Theresa Cheung, Author
Psychologist, philosopher, and author of Habit, William James, explains that without habitual processes we would find it difficult and exhausting to accomplish even everyday tasks such as tying our shoes or dressing ourselves.
This list is for everyone, including children and students. A parent who adopts daily positive habits leads their children by example and encourages them to form similar life habits that will serve them well in their journey through life.
Nourishment
On every healthy habits list: Eat healthily!
Start the day with a healthy breakfast. It will give your body the nutrients it needs to sustain energy and alertness for a day of success.
But there’s more to nourishing the body.
Go outside and get a dose of natural early morning light.
Every single day, you should do this.
It will support your circadian rhythm and set your internal clock for a good sound night’s sleep. It will help with mood, learning, and memory as well.
It’s a simple thing, but it is one of the best daily habits in living intuitively in tune with nature and it is free.
As Earthlings, we are designed to thrive from a daily dose of sunshine. We are diurnal creatures.
Natural light on our body produces vitamin D, which supports healthy bones, and good eye shape for vision, among other physical and mental benefits, as studies show.
Reflection and Gratitude
Spend 5 minutes reflecting. Reflecting is one of those daily habits that will improve your mindset to live intuitively.
Ask: What can I change or not?
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
Søren Kierkegaard
Part of personal development and developing healthy habits of the mind is to start with the one thing about yourself in the present moment that interferes with you achieving success.
An example: You might spend time on important tasks yet get distracted because you feel you need to pay attention to social media for five minutes. Before you know it, that time spent ends up much longer than you intended.
Examples of reflecting habits for winning mindset
Spending just 5 minutes journaling at the start or end of the day is a powerful tool to open yourself to improvement. Things to journal about:
- Where do you want to be
- A new step towards achieving happiness (even a small one)
- Struggles and obstacles
- Disappointments
- Whatever you need to get off your chest
If you find something you are dissatisfied with, look for a solution, and find the positive.
If you have unproductive feelings, acknowledge them and then visualize putting them in a balloon and floating it out the window – gone!
Gratitude journaling for success
For a steadfast positive mindset try a challenge of using a gratitude diary for 100 days. Entering at least three to five matters to be grateful for each day can change your perspective to a deadset winning one.
After only a month of practicing gratitude this way, I noticed a marked difference in my perspective. It is a powerful tool in helping to change bad thought habits formed by your inner critic, which generally get in the way of anyone’s achievements. Can you imagine the effect of one hundred days of it?!
All you need for a gratitude diary is a notebook – it can be digital, but I find a hard copy works best for me. But a dedicated pre-formatted one helps even more to keep you on track for a positive mindset and a fulfilling life.
Make your journal a special one:
Check out my Gratitude Journal
For Cultivating A Positive Mindset And Boosting Emotional Well-Being
I’ve created this journal specifically for inspiring positivity and inviting success your way. Beautifully designed, yet minimalistic, the Gratitude Journal by Maj offers daily entries for 100 days and ample space for your reflections, making it a personal sanctuary where you can reconnect with your inner self.
GRATITUDE JOURNAL by Maj (available at Amazon)
Inclusions
– Instructions
– Prompts and tips
– Inspiring quotes
– Enough for 100 days
– Space to record your wins or setbacks and set your future goals and actions
You now have a clear start for visualizing an improved life. Visualizing is the next part of this habit ‘stack’ – a 10-minute time slot perhaps – a small investment for the overall outcome.
Visualize success
Visualizing success is one of those top habits that you don’t have to schedule as you can do it anywhere, anytime, and conjointly with another good habit. You just need to prompt yourself to do it.
Visualization is a powerful tool for attracting success.
This could be one of those habits to develop with practice and persistence for the payoff.
It involves using your imagination to form a mental picture of you being happy with the desired outcome.
Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere!
Albert Einstein
How?
Get comfortable. Find the perfect cushion if you need to and deeply relax. The best results come from being “in the flow” or alpha state of mind. Meditation will get you into this state as well as journaling and deep breathing techniques.
Spend 5 minutes visualizing how your day will unfold as you would like it. Imagine achieving the desires you’ve just reflected upon and each step needed to achieve these. Imagine the things you smell, hear, taste, and see, and how you feel emotionally.
Many successful professionals in health, education, business, sports, and creative arts use this technique to succeed.
Be patient and continue practicing it as a daily schedule for success.
“…we always attract into our lives whatever we think about the most, believe in most strongly, EXPECT on the deepest levels, and/or imagine most vividly.”
Shakti Gawain (author of Creative Visualization)
My 4P rule is patience + persistence + positivity = payoffs.
Move that body
Humans are built to move and to be in motion so moving is a habit of life.
Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.
Albert Einstein
Reasons this is one of those habits to build on…
- Increases oxygen to the brain
- Sharpens focus and concentration
- Ups overall productivity
- Aids digestion
- Uplifts mood
How to schedule more movement
Modern workplaces mean we sit more and move less.
So try to introduce more incidental movement into your day by consciously choosing to get up from your workstation and move around whether to get a refreshment or to choose to converse with a colleague rather than send an email. You could also try doing some stretches at your workstation.
As well, as schedule an activity at lunchtime or before or after work.
Set good intentions
Setting good intentions for the day and trusting in the outcome beats worry and stress and is a daily routine of successful people who live intuitively.
The trust that everything will be okay.
It might be one of those new habits to try – the power of expectancy.
Remember…Jedi Master Yoda’s reply in The Empire Strikes Back:
When Luke Skywalker exclaimed: “I don’t believe it!”
Yoda replied: “That…is why you fail.”
Believe. Expect that your world will be as it should be. This is a mindset.
You were born to win, but to be a winner, you must plan to win, prepare to win and EXPECT to win ― Zig Ziglar
You are limited by what you believe and your life habits…
It is seen in the personal bests of weightlifters, in people mimicking their avatars, and even in wine tasting.
How to schedule this habit
It’s a mindset.
Practice a set of affirmations, prayers, chants, songs, or whatever resonates with you to set good intentions. You can do this while you are brushing your teeth, in the shower, or combine it with your morning walk or other physical movement activity.
Expect a little miracle
Expect a little help
Expect it to be easy
~ The Universe
Trust your intuition. Expect intuitive messages.
According to Mark Manson, the reason we fail is that “The mind’s unconscious beliefs about possibilities inform the level of effort and expectation of success from the body’s behavior.”
Steps in developing good habits
Developing new habits is not easy.
A new habit will take a minimum of 21 days to form according to Maxwell Maltz, author of Psycho-Cybernetics, A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life. But it could take up to two months to become automatic.
How to make something a habit? Repeat it enough times that it becomes second nature.
Persistence is the key.
Overcoming blocks to forming good habits
- The hardest part is to practice the habits every day. It’s tempting to say: “I don’t have time” or “I’m too busy”. That’s the ego. The inner knowing voice says “Make time!”
- Try swapping the daily news (which is often negative and misleading), FB, or Netflix for 15 minutes with your habit stack or any from your good habits list.
- A good habits app may help e.g. A Way of Life
Habit tracker
A habit tracker can help you reflect on what you’ve achieved. In this way, it’s a good motivational tool.
Tip 1: Choose an anchor as a trigger for you to start the thing/s you want to develop as habits. Brushing your teeth could be an anchor for this habit.
Tip 2: Keep track of your efforts each day (a habit tracker is used for this) as this will help keep you motivated and committed to forming the habits.
Bundling Your habits to schedule your day for success
Try stacking your daily habits. For example from the list above, you can combine nourishment, movement, reflection, visualization, and setting intentions in a routine to start the day.
Here’s an example:
- Give yourself a dose of sunshine and set intentions of success for the day during a morning walk or other movement ritual you’ve chosen.
- Sit quietly for a moment of reflection and then through meditation or another relaxation technique proceed to visualize success. (Tips: Have a journal or other writing material handy for reflections.)
- Nourish your body with a healthy breakfast.
_________
Quitting bad habits
A behavior or routine that is repeated regularly and which causes harm to you or others in the short or long term is my ‘bad habit’ definition.
There are plenty of examples of bad habits. On my personal list of bad habits …was smoking. I started this when I was 14.
It’s one of those common bad habits that you find hard to break because you associate it with socializing, finishing off a meal, and partaking of a coffee or work break.
I remember when my dad quit smoking (as strong-willed as he was) he replaced it with snacking, aka ‘bad’ eating habits. He gained weight and it wasn’t long before he suffered a heart attack. He then had to switch to a strict low-cholesterol diet for life.
So to quit smoking, I learned I needed to form healthy lifestyle habits at the same time.
Instead of reaching for that smoke, I would go for a walk, drink a glass of water, eat a piece of fruit, or take a shower.
I made new associations, ditching the cigarette that had long been my prop, my sidekick.
It took a conscious effort to break my habit of reaching for that cigarette when the urge arose. But, I did it.
No joking, it takes commitment and persistence to break bad habits. But, change your habits, change your life.
How to break bad habits? How to form good ones?
It is not easy to quit or stop bad habits and the same applies to the forming of good ones.
References
- Williams KM, Bentham GCG, Young IS, et al. Association Between Myopia, Ultraviolet B Radiation Exposure, Serum Vitamin D Concentrations, and Genetic Polymorphisms in Vitamin D Metabolic Pathways in a Multicountry European Study. JAMA Ophthalmol. 2017;135(1):47–53. doi:10.1001/jamaophthalmol.2016.4752
