Skip to main content

How Your Habits Shape Your Identity (and Vice Versa)

WHY IS IT so easy to repeat bad habits and so hard to form good ones? Few things can have a more powerful impact on your life than improving your daily habits. And yet it is likely that this time next year you’ll be doing the same thing rather than something better.

However, once your habits are established, they seem to stick around forever—especially the unwanted ones. Despite our best intentions, unhealthy habits like eating junk food, watching too much television, procrastinating, and smoking can feel impossible to break.

Changing our habits is challenging for two reasons: (1) we try to change the wrong thing and (2) we try to change our habits in the wrong way

THREE LAYERS OF BEHAVIOR CHANGE

The first layer is changing your outcomes. This level is concerned with changing your results: losing weight, publishing a book, winning a championship. Most of the goals you set are associated with this level of change. 

The second layer is changing your process. This level is concerned with changing your habits and systems: implementing a new routine at the gym, decluttering your desk for better workflow, developing a meditation practice. Most of the habits you build are associated with this level. 

The third and deepest layer is changing your identity. This level is concerned with changing your beliefs: your worldview, your self-image, your judgments about yourself and others. Most of the beliefs, assumptions, and biases you hold are associated with this level.

Outcomes are about what you get. Processes are about what you do. Identity is about what you believe. When it comes to building habits that last—when it comes to building a system of 1 percent improvements—the problem is not that one level is “better” or “worse” than another. All levels of change are useful in their own way. The problem is the direction of change.

Many people begin the process of changing their habits by focusing on what they want to achieve. This leads us to outcome-based habits. The alternative is to build identity-based habits. With this approach, we start by focusing on who we wish to become.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SURVIVE THE LEARNING CURVE

 Those who can give trading more time when they start have a better chance to succeed. you must be patient. But your time will come. At the start of your trading, you should trade with small size and with one stock. You should not increase your tier size until you are positive 7/10 trading days. You should set a small max loss when you begin. You should be limited in your buying power. For example, when a new trader begins, he should not write more than 10k shares in a day, total. you are not going to be a great trader on Day One Gladwell explains, “Working hard is what really successful people do.” t deep practice, often with continuous feedback, is necessary to become great. Concentrated practice is key Daniel Coyle in The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. If you want to be good at something, practice. Practice deliberately, and do so for many years. FOCUS ON IMPROVING EVERY DAY “I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestioned ability of man to elevate his l...
Post a Comment
Read more
 All great leaders in every walk of life are highly sexed, but they follow the habit of controlling their sex desires, switching them into a driving force behind their occupation. The person who has self discipline understands the emotion of sex, respects it, and learns to control and transmute it into contructive activities. Q: Just what damage is there in over-indulgence of sex? A: The greatest damage is that it depletes the source of man's greatest driving force, and wastes, without adequate compensation, man's creative energy. Controlled sex supplies the magnetic force that attracts people to one another. It is the most important factor of a pleasing personality. It gives quality to the tone of voice and enables one to convey through the voice any feeling desired. It serves, as nothing else can serve, to give motive power to one's desires. It keeps the nervous system changed with the energy needed to carry on the work of maintaining the body. It sharpens the imagination...
Post a Comment
Read more

CAN A FIRM ALWAYS SPOT THE NEXT GREAT TRADER?

 No. But a prop firm can tell who has a poor chance to become a CPT. To be good at anything will take everything you have. Not having developed the skills to work hard is a turn-off. Trading is a skill learned by doing, not just by reading a lot, theorizing, or the faux art of “paper trading.” THE PROS AND CONS OF RECRUITING EXPERIENCED TRADERS Loyalty is a good thing to a point, but it cannot trump logistics and reality. losing money should really bother you. If I am negative three days in a row, I spend a long evening on my couch with a bottle of red wine and comfort food. As traders, we can all recite the memorable line from Wall Street: “A man looks in the abyss, there is nothing staring back at him. At that moment he discovers his character. That keeps the man out of the abyss.”  Traders don’t talk about how they want to trade, what they want to read about trading, or how they wish they could talk about trading. Traders trade, read about trading, and talk about trading.
Post a Comment
Read more