My biggest bad habit (and how I'm building good ones).
/I have a confession to make…
I’m a workaholic.
Ever since I can remember, I’ve been a high achiever, often at the cost of my health and quality of life. For years I thought if I just tried hard enough, I could have a healthy work/life balance, but I couldn’t have been more wrong…
But here's the rub -
When you’re an alcoholic, you can lose your job.
When you’re a workaholic, you get a raise.
When behaviors associated with workaholism are rewarded consistently in this way, they become second nature.
I recently finished reading the book “Atomic Habits” by James Clear, and it was revolutionary for me. The tools I learned from Clear’s book are slowly (but surely) transforming my life from the inside out.
I realized that my life is a direct result of my daily habits, and if I want my life to change, I have to start there.
BUT in order to kick a bad habit, we need more than just willpower.
We need to have the right strategy in place.
According to Clear, to break a bad habit we must do the following:
Make it invisible.
Make it unattractive.
Make it difficult.
Make it unsatisfying.
In my next few emails, I’ll discuss each of these steps in further detail, so you can start breaking your bad habits and replacing them with good ones too.
In the meantime, I’ve included a free exercise that will allow you to take inventory of your daily habits. This will help you determine which ones are good, which ones are neutral, and which ones are keeping you from having the life you want.
We can’t change our habits if we don’t even know what they are, right?