Be Your Best

Todd Gifford – Success Coach

I discuss habit creation and getting rid of bad habits quite a bit.  Habits control a lot of our day, our behavior, and decisions.  So, it stands to reason that creating new ‘good’ habits and eliminating as many ‘bad’ habits as we can would serve us well.  I do a lot of reading and research in the area of habits, and one of the common themes or ‘silver bullets’ that nearly all experts agree on with respect to creating change is something that very few people are willing or know to do.  Drum roll please…Record Keeping.  Wow, I know that was a let down!

Record Keeping
The fact is that awareness of your actual behavior and performance in any given area is crucial to helping you implement change and create new habits.  Awareness starts with tracking and measuring current and future results.  Tracking means that you log data on a consistent basis.  No emotion — just the facts.

Why Does Tracking Progress Facilitate Change?
You have probably heard the expression: “You achieve or succeed at what you measure.”  Regardless of what level of performance the data is (good, bad, neutral, etc…), logging the data and reviewing it does several very important things.

First, there is a very powerful sense of confidence and control that you feel when you are logging data associated to the thing you are focused on improving or focusing on.  Even when the logged data is not particularly good, it still provides this same feeling of control about the future.  I believe this phenomena has to do with transforming abstract into black and white.  When you log or track the data, it provides a sense of demystifying or simplifying the issue.

Second, tracking and recording progress allows you to carefully and precisely ‘ratchet down’ on your target.  With actual data being tracked, you are able to determine what incremental improvement is needed each day/week/month to achieve your goal. 

Third, good record keeping allows you to see your progress and your improvement, which might otherwise go unnoticed.  Positive change results can be very difficult to see or feel daily without hard data that you can look at over a time period.  This is the ‘proof’ that you need to focus on the ‘gain’ and not the ‘pain’.  Success = hundreds or  thousands of little successes stacked on top of each other—not overnight success (there is no such thing).

The Fundamental Difference Between Good Habits and Bad Habits
Another key observation about habits that experts note is this:  ‘Good’ Habits are typically about long term objectives (health, wealth, family, security, etc…), while ‘Bad’ Habits are typically about short term gratification.  Please think about this a little bit, because this is a very important distinction to understand.  There is an underlying ongoing battle inside each one of us over the ‘short term’ vs. the ‘long term’.  Back and forth we go, thinking of the short term, and then thinking of the long term.

There are exceptions, obviously, but many times short term gratification decisions or actions contradict or harm our long term goals.  It is the proverbial ’I want some chocolate now and it makes me feel really good for a couple minutes…but harms my longer term goal of shedding a few pounds.’  Clearly there is a good balance to be struck, but if you can focus most of your thinking and actions on the longer term picture, your habits will tend to be in the ‘Good’ category.  This is one reason why it is so important to have your short, medium, and long term goals documented.  Clear short term goals that roll up into long term goals give you a fighting chance to win the battle against bad habits.  Providing yourself with clear daily, weekly, and monthly goals makes it easier to manage the bad habits and create good habits.  Add in some good progress tracking, and you are in the driver’s seat to accomplish a lot!

Be Your Best,
Todd D. Gifford