Do you believe that small daily habits have the power to change your life?

 

Too often we imagine for great change to happen in our life we need this big transformation moment.

 

Now whilst that happens for a few people the fact is that most successful people swear by having good daily habits.

 

Find out why small daily habits can be transformation below and discover how you can take advantage of this knowledge to achieve more success in your life. 

I first came across the idea of daily habits building to make a major difference in your life in The Compound Effect. I instantly fell in love with the book. The message was simple. Small changes can change your life. A small change every day will build up in time.

Each day we make numerous choices and most choice will move slightly towards or away from the life we dream of. Now each decision alone will only make a tiny shift. However, those shifts add up over time. Those shifts will either add up to take you towards or away from your goals.

Now, most people make bad choices on a daily basis. They even know it at the time but tell themselves “It’s just once.  It doesn’t matter. It won’t make that much of a difference”. The fact is it will make a difference. It adds up over time.

So you have a choice. You can either focus on developing daily habits that will help you achieve your dream life or you can keep on making little bad decisions and move further away from your dream life.

Hopefully, you’ll go with the first option and below I’m sharing how you can use the power of small daily habits to change your life

 

1- WORK OUT WHAT CHANGE YOU WANT IN YOUR LIFE

Before you can work out what habits you need to adopt you’ll need to be clear about the transformation you want to me. You might instantly know what parts of your life you want to change. If so you can head straight over to step 2. If however, you aren’t sure what change you want to make then you should have a go at the Wheel of Life exercise. The wheel of life exercise is a personal development tool that asks you to access different aspects of your life on a scale from 1-10. By looking at each area of your life in turn at the end you’ll be able to visually see how you currently feel about each area of your life and then make choices about the areas you want to make a change in. You can find out exactly how to complete a Wheel of Life here.

 

2 – WRITE DOWN ALL OF THE HABITS THAT COULD HELP YOU TO ACHIEVE YOUR GOALS

For some goals, it might be that there are a number of habits that would help you to achieve the goal

For example, if you want to lose weight there are two ways you can achieve that goal. Firstly, you can reduce your daily calorie intake and secondly, you can increase your physical exercise and thus burn more calories.

Another example would be if you want to have £1,200 in savings in a year. Firstly, you could increase the amount of money you make so you are able to save £100 per month and secondly, you could reduce your spending so you can save £100 per month.

For your goals write down all of the possible habits that could potentially help you achieve your goal.

 

3 – SELECT A HABIT THAT YOU ARE GOING TO DEVELOP

Once you’ve written down all of the things you could do you should review the list and decide what you will do. You aren’t going to form a habit overnight and to increase your chances of success forming a new habit it is best to just focus on creating one new habit at a time.

 

4 – MAKE A TRACKER

A great way to form a daily habit is to keep track of it. My tracking, either digitally or physically, it will force you to pay attention to doing the habit and hopefully as you get further into the habit forming process you won’t want to break the chain. If you’ve never heard of the idea of ‘don’t break the chain’ the thought is that if you are tracking as humans we want to see the chain get longer and longer. We don’t want to let ourselves down so making the tracking visual we increase our chances of continuing to form a habit. You can find out more about don’t break the chain and how to use it yourself right here. 

 

5 – BE PATIENT

Now it can be tempting to practice a habit for a few weeks and think that there hasn’t been any difference. Remember this isn’t about creating a big change in an instant. This is about slow and steady wins the race. You are in this for the long-term. In the beginning, it will take time for momentum to kick in, but once it does you’ll be happy that you kept going in the beginning.

 

THAT’S IT! You know now about the power of small daily habits and have a process to follow to help you start making new daily habits now that will change your life.

If you like the idea of embracing new small habits to change your life you should definitely read The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy and Atomic Habits by James Clear. Both are amazing books, which I loved, and made it onto the reading list for PropelHer’s Book Club.

You can check out my review of Atomic Habits here. 

 

And if you aren’t already a member of PropelHer’s Book Club you should definitely consider joining. PropelHer’s Book Club is a non-fiction book club for ambitious women who are committed to their personal development. We read and discuss one book a month. You can see everything we’ve read to date by clicking here and you can find out more about the book club and sign up here.