Let’s talk about habits. Aristotle said: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” He’s talking about repetition. Like I always say about Sales Training, repetition is the mother of skill. This is obvious yet your brain will try to fool you into thinking the opposite. Your brain tells you that it doesn’t matter. It’s just this once. Today doesn’t matter. You can start tomorrow. But tomorrow never comes. Your brain is all about getting short term pleasures and avoiding short term pain – it’s not smart enough to see that short term pleasure is often at odds with long term happiness, and short term discomfort is exactly what is needed to avoid long term pain. The smart ones train themselves to think long term and build the discipline of favouring delayed gratification and taking pleasure from what they used to view as short term pain.

Your habits are what determine your success in achieving your goals. We don’t rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our habits. Here’s a great goal setting process from Martin Grunberg, author of The Habit Factor:

Create Your Goal In Six Simple Steps

The process to set up a goal and its core, related habits is relatively straightforward. However, the system does require some thoughtful consideration, so each of the steps is first outlined and then explained in detail.

1. Identify the goal.
2. Specify the Start Date and Projected End Date.
3. Capture the “Why?” That is, why is your goal meaningful and emotionally significant?
4. Describe in detail what the goal looks like once it has been successfully achieved.
5. Identify Key Milestones in the journey toward your completed goal.
6. Habit Alignment. Set up core habits that relate to the achievement of your goal. This process has its own six steps:
   1. Identify core habits (between 3-5).
   2. Establish minimum success criteria for each habit.
   3. Describe why each habit is important.
   4. Identify Target Days of the week you will perform the behaviour/habit.
   5. Establish the Tracking Period start and end dates.
   6. TRACK! (Daily!)

Your daily habits are what make you. And so it is with your practice, the daily habits in your practice are what define the kind of practice you have. Let’s finish with an important distinction; you are a human being, not a machine. You have emotions and feelings flowing through you, you have other humans who you are connected to and who you care about and who you are affected by, you have a complex life with many responsibilities and moving parts. So be kind to yourself and be realistic.

At the OSA: Game of Success conference in Birmingham a few years ago, performance psychologist Jamil Quershi spoke about his working with six different individuals who reached number one in the world in their sport. None of them said, tomorrow I am going to make huge changes. Sea change! Nope. These people who reached number one in the world said things like “I’ve noticed I get good results when I do this so I’m going to try to be a bit more consistent doing that.” So on that note, what are you going to try to be a bit more consistent with this month? And then keep asking yourself that question every week. Where do you want to be a bit more consistent?