Build Good Daily Habits for a Lifetime of Success

Habits come in two forms: good and bad. If you want success, you need good daily habits. Think about it for a second: if you brush your teeth, shower, exercise, and eat right on a daily basis, you are building a successful, healthy body. It works the same way with everything else. Your habits determine your success, in life, in business, and in every aspect of what you do. Creating positive habits will lead to much more success in your lifetime.

When you’re looking to build good habits, you have to start with a routine. Simply waking up and going right to your email might be tempting, but that will likely set the stage for a lack of direction and focus in your entire day. Instead, you should create a schedule or to-do list for your day. It’s better if you do this at the beginning of the week or the day before so that it’s ready when you wake up in the morning. Starting your day with a to-do list is just going to lead to more lost focus as you get distracted by list making and scheduling.

Organization counts, more than you realize. People who are organized tend to be more successful in their life simply because their brain can stay focused and on track throughout the day. If your day starts off randomly every morning, try making a plan. Even if it’s as simple as scheduling your coffee, shower, and commute to work, it will help. There’s an old saying floating around that it takes 21 days to create a habit. If you can stick to a simple schedule for just three weeks, you’ll be able to create a whole new routine for a lifetime of success.

Here are some good daily habits that will build your chances of success:

-Be positive.

Even if you wake up on the wrong side of the bed, change it. Take a walk, listen to your favorite music, or think about all the positive things you have to look forward to in your day. Attitude goes a long way in building habits and being successful.

-Stop the chaos.

You’re busy. But that doesn’t mean that your life has to be total chaos all the time. If you implement some structure and stop running everywhere like you don’t know which end is up, you’ll be a lot less stressed and more successful. This is where organization, list-making, and routines come into play.

-Stop procrastinating.

The funny part about things we don’t like doing is that they tend to be more tolerable if we just get them done. Stop putting off things because they’ll be hanging over your head, affecting your mood and your productivity until they are done. Just do it, and move on.

-Avoid time wasting activities.

If you want to check your personal email or social networks while you enjoy your morning coffee (or other activity), go ahead. Just limit yourself to 15-20 minutes, and then move on with your day. Schedule time for these tasks so that they don’t eat up your productivity. How often have you logged onto your email or social network only to look up an hour later and realize all the time you’ve wasted?

-Have a positive self-image.

Success and building habits takes more than willpower. You have to take your emotions off of auto-pilot and be conscious about your thoughts, behaviors, and actions. That includes believing that you CAN be successful and change your habits, which is critical to the entire process.

The secret here isn’t really a secret at all. A lot of people are either afraid of, or feel undeserving of, success. Therefore, creating good daily habits becomes difficult and taxing, as they are fighting to prove to themselves that they are worth the change. If you can change your self-image and get on board with organization and structure, your work and your life in general will be much more successful in the end.