Once a wise man asked another man: “Can you keep a secret?” The other man eagerly replied that he could: “Then observe!” said the wise man: “So can I”

Personal self control can make the difference between a life well lived with plans and dreams realized and a sense of regret and waste.

Research stretching back years showed that children as young as four who could exert self discipline by controlling an impulse to have a sweet now so that they could have two sweets later (1) were more likely to have successful happy lives as adults. Self discipline doesn’t just make us successful it makes us happy it seems.

But self discipline isn’t just about the lottery of genetically inherited luck; something we’re either born with or not. We can all learn to control even master our immediate wants and impulses. So how do you do this? How can you purposefully strengthen your self discipline?

Step one: Exercise your discipline muscle

Just think about the language we use to describe self discipline: We talk about it being “strong” or “weak” just like a muscle. And research (2) has found that just like a muscle the more you exercise your self control the stronger it gets.

But it gets better. Exercising will power in one place (such as making ourselves work on our cherished project for a set time every day) will start to strengthen self discipline in other areas such as being able to say no to that tempting social invitation when you’d previously promised your pal you’d sit and listen to their marital problems. . So exercising self discipline specifically can strengthen it generally. But alas self discipline behaves like a muscle in another way too…

Step two: Don’t overdo it!

Exercising all day every day, lifting weights for hours on end won’t make you stronger in fact overtraining will start to weaken and waste your muscles (3)

Likewise people who have a New Years’ Resolution frenzy deciding to exert massive amounts of self discipline all over the place all at once will likely end up feeling less able to exert self control. When we exercise a muscle we deplete it of stored natural sugars (glycogen) and eventually the muscle weakens which means we need to rest. It’s the same with self control. Amazingly when you exert self discipline you actually deplete glycogen stores in your body just as with physical exertion! (4) Its even been found that ensuring your blood sugar levels are stable helps strengthen self discipline. So decide where you want to focus your self control, don’t overdo it all at once and build it up slowly.

Step three Beware of perfectionism

Having to do everything absolutely perfectly may, paradoxically, over use your supplies of will power needlessly making you less fulfilled and effective. Remember exerting self discipline drains glucose levels from the body and the perfectionist feels they have to exert their will and attempt to control everything. Feeling compelled to control all kinds of things that you really don’t need to (such as what other people say or think) is a waste of will power where it could be reserved and focussed on where you really need it. Being to perfectionist can make us give up earlier and stop trying or bothering because of the thinking error that: “If it’s not exactly as I feel it should be then it’s not worth bothering with at all!”

So remind yourself that you are only human and that you can make mistakes and you’ll actually find greater levels of self discipline.

Step four: Strongly imagine the consequences of your actions

The children in the self discipline research who were able to forgo having a marshmallow treat immediately by waiting (and thereby getting two treats!) were able to do this because they used their imaginations constructively. This is a good example of how one of nature’s finest human tools, the imagination, is meant to be used (one way it is commonly misused is through needless worrying) When you need to exert discipline and lead your own impulses really imagine the positive consequences later of being strong now. I use hypnosis with my clients, a very powerful way to access the imagination to strengthen resolve in this way.

Step five: Remind yourself who you are

When we feel like being weak we become trapped in the present (sometimes “living in the moment” isn’t so great) But it’s been found (5) that when we feel like giving into temptation stating to ourselves or even out loud our core values can give us an injection of immediate self discipline. Doing this can snap us out of tunnel vision and illuminate the bigger picture which in turn weakens the impulse. So next time you feel magnetically drawn to those doughnuts you might tell yourself: “Health and the welfare of my body is important to me!” or if someone felt compelled to treat someone else badly they might state to themselves: “Being a decent human being is important to me!” Try it.
And finally I’m reminded of the words of the ancient Roman poet Horace “Rule your mind or it will rule you.”

About Author

Mark Tyrrell regularly exerts self discipline to ensure he produces his prodigious output of articles, downloads and training, including a recent download on self discipline.

References:

1. C. and Mischel, W. (1976). Effects of temptation-inhibiting and task-facilitating plans on self-control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 33 (2), 209-217 DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.33.2.209.
2. See: Gailliot, M.T., Mead, N.L., & Baumeister, R.F. (2008). Self-Regulation, In O.P. John, R.W. Robbins & L.A. Pervin (Eds.), Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research (pp. 472-491). New York: The Guilford Press.
3. See: Doug McGuff’s excellent book ‘Body by science’ 2009
4. The mind-body response of exerting willpower literally fatigues us (Tice et al., 2007). It depletes physical power, as shown in one study that looked at the effects of mental self-control on physical stamina (Bray et al., 2008). In this study, trying to control one’s thoughts decreased muscular endurance, as measured by performance and EMG activity. The researchers who conducted this study called the effect ‘central fatigue’. This all provides another reason why it might be a good idea to exercise first thing.
5. According to research conducted by Schmeichel and Vohs in 2009.

Read more in: Mastering Habits, Motivation, Productivity.

Sharing your knowledge, especially if it’s useful and unique, isn’t always easy. There are plenty of reasons why you should do this, but somehow it’s very easy to get stopped by negative assumptions. In today’s post, I’d like to share my opinion on sharing knowledge, and ask for yours in return.

Naturally, most of us feel competition. Even in your own team, you’re bound to think now and then of how good or bad your performance is compared to that of other team members. While this is absolutely natural, you shouldn’t let such a competition spirit get in the way of you sharing the knowledge with others.

The Truth About Sharing Knowledge

One of the worst things you can do is to refuse sharing the knowledge with your team. When you do this, you may have your own reasons, but even if you tell them, your peers would get their own, very different ideas.

One of the most common reasons for not sharing is the fear of losing your unique advantage. I used to think that it’s always best to have a unique skillset within a team, and never share any of the knowledge with others. The more you know of things nobody else knows, the better. Boy, was I wrong in such thinking!

The truth is, all the knowledge must be shared. If you think a bit longer, you will understand that no matter how good you are, if you work for a company and act on behalf of a certain team of people – this implies that everything you know or learn must be shared. You are paid for achieving collective results, and if this means teaching others how to do everything you’re capable of, then do your best and show them. You are not paid for making life harder for other team members just because you’re not feeling like sharing something.

Being open with your team and freely sharing anything you know is one of the major signs of you being comfortable where you are. Being a great team player depends on your comfortable participation in every process of such a team, including knowledge exchange. In addition to this, shared knowledge ensures your team stays safe should anything unexpected happen to you – even if you’re temporarily unavailable, your team members will be quite comfortable covering for you with the information you had previously shared with them.

There is a certain point in your professional life, when you suddenly see how most of your fears were really amateur. In fact, I’m sure that every fear you have about your job becomes silly at some stage of your career. Every single one of your fears can and will be smiled upon one day – you’ll look back and laugh how you were afraid of doing something so simple or easy. It’s just a matter of time and a subject to your ever-expanding experience.

Common Fears and How to Overcome Them

With this in mind, I’m going to save you the trouble of figuring out most of the competition fears which stop so many people from sharing their knowledge. I’m giving you the false statements similar to the ones I myself had once believed to be true.

Before we start: Using this opportunity, I’d like to apologize for my behavior to some of the people I’ve been lucky enough to work with in my career so far. I also thank you, for if it wasn’t for the support and guidance from some of you, I would have never changed for the better.

Here they are, the statements which you should never accept, long with my advice on how to act in every situation:

Fear of Not Having Unique Skills

False statement: If you don’t have a unique skill, you will no longer be needed in your team and will probably be fired.

Yep, that’s exactly how I looked at sharing knowledge at some stage in my life (the first years of my career, to be precise). Now, I admit that some companies support and promote such a behavior among their employees, but without cooperation and shared knowledge it’s impossible to have people function as a team.

My advice: Skills, not matter unique or not, can’t really be shared. They are your own ways of doing things, of applying the knowledge the most effective way. Your knowledge can and should be shared, but skills are always going to be yours – there will never be two people on a team with exactly the same skills, so you shouldn’t worry about it. If you explain everything you know to others, you will only gain wider acceptance as an authority.

Losing Your Roles and Positions Within a Team

False statement: If I give away everything I know, my services will no longer be needed as other team members will be doing everything themselves

My advice: if you have so much knowledge you worry about sharing it, you’re probably an avid learner. This means it will never become possible for you to give everything away, because you’ll be learning something new almost every day. If others start doing more based on the knowledge they get from you, this will give you a chance to work on new and perhaps more exciting projects.

You know what? Eventually there comes a time when you want to move on. When you’re no longer feeling like you’re giving most value by staying in your position and doing what you currently do. And guess what – until you have your knowledge properly shared, you won’t be able to leave your functions behind!

Another common way this happens is that you become so unique and so good ad your particular functions, that everyone else in your team wants you and only you to keep doing it! Sometimes your colleagues won’t let you work on other things just because this will mean you’ll have to abandon some of the common functions you’ve been doing so far. For them, it can be an unnecessary risk – nobody knows how good you’ll be at new things, but everyone knows you’re really good with your current functions. So, before you decide that you want to move on to something new, be sure to get into the habit of sharing.

Shared Knowledge Reducing Your Chances to be Promoted

False statement: If I share everything, I will never stand out enough to be promoted

My advice: you never get promoted based on the knowledge you possess, it’s always to do with your experience and results – both measuring your ability to apply the knowledge.

You can get hired partially because of your vast knowledge, yes. But promotions usually happen because you grow out of your position by accepting more responsibilities and doing more. This happens not because your professional knowledge grows, but because your become more aware of processes in your organization and recognize the potential for improvements. The higher you are in your career, the more personality-based your success is, and the less it is dependent on your professional skills. The value you bring to the team or organization is rarely based only on your knowledge of the processes, it’s increasingly more to do with how comfortable you are doing what you do and taking on new projects and challenges.

Sharing Knowledge To Be Successful

Sharing knowledge is one of the best things you can do to become a great team player and ultimately a leader. It is essential not only for the success of people around you, but for your own success in the first place. The more you share, the more people respect you. The more respected you feel, the more you’re willing to share. The more you give away, the more new opportunities come your way.

Perhaps my advices won’t cover every possible situation you can find yourself in, but they’re drawn from my own experience. I know how hard it is to learn from somebody else’s mistakes and not your own ones, but my advice stays the same – learn to share the knowledge, and you’ll thank yourself later.

Finally, if you recognize the common fears of sharing knowledge or have some of your own – leave them in a comment, I’m sure it will help someone.

Read more in: Mastering Habits, Personal Development.

I’ve recently come across another quite interesting challenge, and once again I just couldn’t let it pass without participating.

It looks like Jenny and Erin are on their quest to find out as much as possible about habits. They seem to be interested in every little detail: what you think of habits, how you form them, and what makes your habit setting and mastering a success. Everyone’s more than welcome to participate.

Those of you who’ve been reading this blog for some time will surely remember that habits are one of the topics I’m passionate about. I like talking about them so much that there’s even a separate category created on my blog: Mastering Habits.

That’s why I knew I had to participate from the very first moment I saw the challenge. I’m not after the prize, really, but love the opportunity to share a few more thoughts on my habits.

Below are my answers to the three questions asked by Jenny and Eric.

How big of a role do habits play in your daily life?

I think habits play huge role in my life. Why? Because most positive progress is made through habitual way of doing things.

I’ve got a habit or a plan to get a habit for just about anything I do:

• an early morning habit to help me get started with my day
• a shower ritual to get energized and wake up before I get to writing and blogging
• a habit of checking my emails twice a day
• a habit of putting everything into my inbox for later processing

There’s also a habit of going to gym every day, and a habit to never leave a question unanswered. A habit to review the progress with my tasks and goals at the end of each day. A habit of planning my day ahead in the quiet hours of each morning.

I could go on, but there’s so many habits that it will take me much longer time than what I have allocated for this post. I hope you get the idea.

Discipline and motivation are key to mastering habits

Some habits require discipline, that’s absolutely true. However, that’s the whole beauty of a really good habit with some clear values: you don’t have to constantly make an effort to maintain it. Most habits need effort when they’re at their forming stage – it takes 30 days or so to form a new habit, but once it’s done – you feel the real need for the habit because of the benefits you get from it, and you start enjoying the time or environment which is associated with a particular task which is part of the habit.

Take my habit of going to a gym, for instance. It’s such a natural and positive habit of mine by now, that my even if I miss a single day of my workout, I will immediately notice the lack of the usual advantage a gym session gives me: a boost of mid-day energy, a sense of physical accomplishment, a taste of a small daily win over my previously set challenges. I need all of these things in my life, and because I know exactly how to get them, I’m more than happy to follow this habit and exercise regularly.

Bad habits (I’ve got a few of them just like every other human has) are playing a rather important role too. They’re here to remind me of some crucial processes and approaches I need to change as soon as I can. Some bad habits have immediate and direct impact, like eating junk food or watching too much TV, but others have a much longer and deeper impact while not being so obviously harmful.

Do your habits typically form intentionally or unconsciously?

That depends. I guess all my habits are different in this regard, and most of them required both conscious and unconscious efforts to form.

For instance, I have an unconscious habit of spending too much time at computer at evenings. I may sit down for just a 5-minute task, and end up working on something for hours and hours.

This is not the worst case of a computer addiction – I actually get things done, while I could be simply wasting my time browsing and watching TV trailers from imdb.com. But it’s very bad that such a habit is not controlled yet. It gets harder when this habit clashes with something conscious you’re trying to work on.

The particular habit of late long computer hours conflicts with the habit of my early mornings. My early mornings are 4:30am, and unless I go to bed around 22-22:30, no amount of will and determination is going to be enough to wake me up at 4:30am consistently, day by day. I can live off 3 hours of sleep for a few days in a row, but eventually this tires me down so much that I have to chance or cancel other plans and activities just to get a moment to rest.

The only way around this situation is to actually make a habit of agreeing on a particular time in the eveing when, no matter what, all activities are stopped because it’s time to get some rest. Such a conscious habit will then impact the unconscious desire to work late.

Conscious approach to forming habits

I try to form my habits consciously. I look at my everyday life and identify needs and opportunities for new habits. I prioritize potential habits by the predicted gains and benefits compared to the required commitment, and once the decision on a particular habit is made I start baby-sitting it for the next 30 days. By that time, my new habit matures and toughens up, and it’s probably safe to relax a bit and reap the rewards.

The longer the habit stays with you, the less work it requires from yourself to maintain it. As you go through weeks and months of following a new habit, the actions required for it become more and more natural to you, and you do them automatically. Such actions need less and less of your conscious attention, thus giving you more time to concentrate on the benefits of maintaining the habit.

What approaches have you found successful in shaping them?

Give at least 3o days for each habit to form

I owe most of success with my habits to a 30 day trial each one of them gets. And this method was originally suggested by Steve Pavlina in his highly popular article: 30 Days to Success.

This means that every habit should go through at least 30 days of consistency. After this period, if you still find yourself following the habit, it’s probably here to stay. If you gave it up earlier, it’s time to reassess the habit – confirm the values and benefits it gives and consider changing part of the habit to make it easier to follow.

Creative habit naming

For many habits of mine, I come up with great names created in such a creative manner that they serve a few purposes instead of just one.

I have come up with this technique quite some time ago, and strongly believe it makes sense to use the name of your habit to achieve maximum results. If it can motivate you, use this opportunity. If the name of your habit can help you track your progress, do it. There are many ways to employ this approach, and I talk about the main three – motivation, progress tracking and positive affirmations – in the Creative Habit Naming series:

• Creative Habit Naming – Part 1
• Creative Habit Naming – Part 2
• Creative Habit Naming – Part 3

Habit List from Productivity 501

This is great way to maintain your habits list which I found great for a high-level overview of how successful each habit is. Created by Mark Shead from Productivity501, this habit list is a perfect example of a paper-based tool which can prove invaluable in your quest to master habits.

The approach is really easy: you list all your habits in a matrix, and mark every occurrence of each habit for every day of the month. At the planning stage, you set a daily target of habits to have gone through, and by summing up the habits on each day you can see good you’re doing overall with your habits.

Have a look at the original post for more info: Habit List at Productivity501.

Now it’s your turn!

I hope you’ve enjoyed the post and gained something new from it. Why not share your own ideas about habits? Please read Jenny and Erin’s original post for all the instructions. As always, I’d love to hear about your take on habits, so please leave a comment or give me a link to your posts.

Read more in: Mastering Habits.

1) Early mornings – 4:30am
This is the latest habit which I’m still working on, and it’s going surprisingly well. Perhaps, my previous habit of 5:30am helped, plus I’m concentrating on early mornings more now, and when there’s a focus, there’s an improvement too!

I plan to write a big article on becoming an early rise. It’s been done before, and there are quite a few really good guides around (I really like the Become an Early Riser one at ZenHabits), but there’s always going to be a new angle to look at why people want to rise early and how they manage to do it on a consistent basis.

2) Most Important Tasks approach
Although I’ve been rather happy managing my tasks and projects with the wonderful MyLife Organized, I felt a lack of a higher structure of better goals alignment.

Eventually, I came to the Most Important Tasks approach. I daily pick the 3 most important things I want to get done, and although the list of other things planned for the same day can have another 3-7 items, I will not touch them until the 3 important tasks are fully dealt with.

I’m also not multitasking when working on the most important tasks. They need my full attention, plus the 3 tasks are already ordered by their importance – so until finishing the most important one, I don’t even want to think about the next one on the list.

3) Low-carb diet
I’ve been doing this for a month and a half, and have lost 7kg so far! Quite an achievement, given the fact that my weight stayed almost the same in the few months of gym training before that. My goal is much more than that, and combined with my ever-changing daily gym routine I envision great results in the coming months.

Mark McManus has helped me a lot along the way, so be sure to check his blog out, he’s been giving more focus to fitness articles lately, and I agree with him on most accounts.

From just a habit, my diet (which was rather strict the first 2 weeks, I kept daily carbs under 15g in total) had since developed into a healthier lifestyle. To my own astonishment, I’ve completely given up on sugar and coffee, and made a few more choices which already show positive effect on my health.

I’m working on a few more habits as well, but will talk about them when they’re more established. For the moment though, I’ll be focusing on the ones above, and will be posting my impressions as separate articles.

Has anything of the above interested you? Let me know what you think, and help me decide which habit to write about.

Read more in: Mastering Habits.

As you probably remember from the first part of Creative Habit Naming mini-series which was posted last November, I’ve discovered a very effective technique for mastering your habits: creative habit naming.

The idea is pretty simple: when you’re working out a particular habit, every little helps to stay motivated and interested enough. When it comes to mastering habits, creative habit naming is a very effective way of making your life easier.

I’ve also identified three main directions in creative habit naming: motivation, progress tracking and positive affirmations. Previous two parts of this mini-series have covered topics on motivation and progress tracking, and today I’m going to talk about the third direction I have identified – positive affirmations.

The most interesting to play with are self-imaging and success acknowledgement affirmations, so I’m going to talk a little about both.

Self-imaging

Just think of what your new habit will improve in you, how exactly it will change your image, and this will help you come up with a suitable self-imaging title. The total body workout class I attend every Thursday, for instance, helps me much more when I think of it as of my “perfect abs class”. It motivates me much more this way, and keeps me focused in a specific way – so I do every exercise the best way I can just because I always remind myself that every (relatively) little effort brings me closer to having the perfect abs I want to eventually have.

Using similar approach, you can probably think of many other names for your habits which will help your self-image: your bulking-up session (in bodybuilding), your feather-lite jogging (makes you feel lighter and therefore better when you run), your sunshine smiles routine (it does help you to smile more openly), your pretty woman walk (the really confident way pretty women act when they know they’re beautiful) and so on.

Success acknowledgement

It never harms to take time and acknowledge how far you’ve already gotten with your goals. So working on new habits, it will pay tenfold if you come up with a creative success acknowledgement title.

Here are a few examples for you to work on:

• being a guru in your field – you can use any industry or subject name with this, like: blogging guru, or motivation guru, or UNIX guru. I admit, it’s best when others call you this, but working on habits towards becoming a guru will benefit you in many ways even if you’re the only one (so far) thinking this way.
• employee of the month – you can call yourself that every morning when planning your working day ahead and thinking of all the things you need to get done.
• professional approach – the more professional you think you are, the more professional you will ultimately act. To be considered a professional in your field, you obviously need to possess the necessary knowledge, but being able to show your skills off and offer help in a friendly way is a whole art on its own, and this is where you will greatly benefit from a simple yet interestingly named habit.
• self-made millionaire – this habit name presumes that you’re already a success, a person well on its way towards wealth and independence.
• best friend – you can’t obviosuly become one by simply starting habit like this, but you and your friends will benefit if you make reviewing your contacts and relationships a daily habit aimed to help you identify what else you can possibly do to make your friends feel better

That’s it! I hope you’ve learned yet another approach for making your habits into successful tools of self-improvement, and I wish you every luck with making everyday positive changes!

Related Articles:

• Creative Habit Naming - Part 2
• Creative Habit Naming - Part 1
• Take Control of Your Habits
• The Power Of Habit Put To The Test

Read more in: Mastering Habits, Motivation, Personal Development.

The idea is pretty simple: when you’re working out a particular habit, every little helps to stay motivated and interested enough. When it comes to mastering habits, creative habit naming is a very effective way of making your life easier.

I’ve also identified three main directions in creative habit naming: motivation, progress tracking and positive affirmations. In the first part of the series, I’ve covered the motivational part of creative habit naming.

Today, I’m going to talk about the second direction you can distinguish – progress tracking.

If you were asked to come up with an additional function for a name of any habit you have, progress tracking would probably be one of your very first guesses.

Why? Because tracking your progress is always a good thing, and measuring your performance in mastering a particular habit is just too cool an idea to pass it by.

Here are the two most useful ways of naming your habit with progress tracking in mind:

Regularity

As you probably know, one of the hardest things in mastering habits is the fact that it’s so damn hard to stay regularly committed. Honestly now, most of people who don’t exercise or commit regularly to some other kind of habit do this not because they’re lazy, but because it is actually hard to repeat the same set of actions over and over again without seeing great results quickly enough.With most habits, you have to stay committed for quite some time, before you finally start getting some results.

It’s not like you can try it one day, and then immediately see the positive result in just a few moments. It usually takes few days, if not few weeks, to see the first positive confirmation of your habit working towards the ultimate result you desire.

So it only makes sense to name some of your habits in such a way that the name itself will contain come kind of regular commitment.

Think of how frequently you’re going to get back to your habit. If it’s a daily action, or a weekly one – then you probably know what words you need for the name of a habit (daily or weekly, for those who don’t follow me yet).

If you look at naming a habit this way, you will actually remember many good habits you already have, which you stay pretty committed to: your Sunday church, your Saturday golf, your Thursday night out (very traditional thing here in Ireland by the way). It doesn’t have to be a weekday, either. You have many other habits, I’m sure: your morning shower, your daily job (not a very nice habit, I must admit – but hey it probably pays to do so!).

There are also some quite successful extremes which don’t even seem to have anything regular in their names, but they are habits as well: your birthday (I bet this is one habit you always stay faithful to), your anniversary, etc.

Count

This is another way of being creative with naming your habits. Just add some kind of count to the name!

For instance, here’s how my ab crunching routine is called: my daily 42 ab crunches. The name suggests, as you can see, the regularity of the habit (I’m proud to say that over the course of 3 months I’ve only skipped two days) and the count of ab crunches I’m doing every particular week.

I started a while ago with 30 reps a day. I did them for a week, and then moved on to 31 reps a day. After a week I’ve increased the number again, and so this week it is 42.

Using count in the name of you habit helps you not only track your progress, but also gives you additional motivation by confirming how far you’ve gone already. By simply reminding myself that it’s 42 ab crunches this morning, I also realize that it’s been 3 months of my exercises.

42 sounds much better than the original 30 ab crunches I’ve started with, and trust me it feels differently too – it’s harder to have 42 reps, but at the same time it feels great to be able to do 42 and still feel like you could do extra 20 just because you’ve improved so much over the time.

Another way to use count in naming a habit is to you is as a deadline. For instance, you can have a habit like this:

• Learn a new language in 2 years time
• Become a millionaire by the age of 30
• Learn how to count from 1 to 1000 in Chinese

That’s all for today. Have I left something out? Please leave your thoughts on this topic in comments area, I would live to learn your approaches to creative habit naming. Thanks in advance!

Related Articles:

• Creative Habit Naming - Part 1
• Are You Interested?
• Take Control of Your Habits

Read more in: Mastering Habits, Personal Development.

Everyone faces a moment where a particular habit stops being attractive up to the point of giving it up. There are obviously different reasons for ending up like this, but mastering your habits can get a whole lot easier by employing a very simple yet useful technique: creative habit naming.

I haven’t seen anything written on this topic, and so mostly I had to try different approaches myself. If you know of any author covering the topic of creative habit naming in a book or a blog, please let me know.

The idea is pretty simple: when you’re working out a particular habit, every little helps to stay motivated and interested enough. When it comes to mastering habits, creative habit naming is a very effective way of making your life easier.

By picking a thoughtful name for your new habit, you can dramatically improve your chances of mastering it, simply because every time you come back to thoughts of the habit, you will reiterate the motivational name you gave it and automatically gain benefit from this.

Naming a habit may not seem terribly important, but it actually means a lot and holds a key to your success. What I offer you is not a revolutionary new approach which will make your habit feel easier to master, but it will make it seem easier and appear more attractive, which will help you stay on top of things.

I’ve identified three main directions in creative habit naming: motivation, progress tracking and positive affirmations.

Today, I’m going to cover the first topic – getting motivation through naming your habits wisely and creatively.

You can’t have too much motivation. No matter what you do, you and your positive outcome will only benefit from any motivation you find in and for the process.

I find it very easy to name my habits in such a way that they become quite motivational. This helps me benefit from the habit even more, and generally makes my experience of working out a habit a much easier and more pleasant process.

Here are the three most useful ways to name your habit and get additional motivation from doing this:

Goal Statement

This is one of the easiest way to stay motivated: always remember your goal. If it’s an impressive enough a goal, you will get additional pleasure in repeating it every time you work on your habit, trust me!

It really is up to you to decide what your habits naming style is going to be, you can be funny, serious, playful, cheerful – you name it. Anything goes, as long as you’re clearly stating your goal.

Here are just a few examples of using goal statements in naming a habit:

• Enjoying life on a daily basis, no matter what.
• Becoming a better father to your kids
• Getting fit in an easy and healthy way

Major focus

Another aspect of naming your habits for motivation is maintaining a focus. In many cases, it’s too subtle a difference from stating your goal, but you can actually use your habit’s name to serve both of these purposes. For example:

• Becoming indecently rich while not killing yourself with work.
• Meeting new people while not forgetting about the friends you already have
• Building a better relationship with your partner by paying more attention and keeping your own promises.

Benefits and value

This is the last highly motivational way of naming a habit I want to cover today. It is aimed to remind you of why your habit is so cool and what exactly you are getting from regularly committing to it.

Here are just a few examples:

• Learn a new language so that you can enjoy talking to natives when travelling.
• Getting fit to enjoy a healthier and therefore longer life
• Read more books to grow personally and gain knowledge

Have I left something out? Please leave your thoughts on this topic in comments area, I would live to learn your approaches to creative habit naming. Thanks in advance!

Related Articles:

• 3 Golden Rules of Goal Setting
• Take Control of Your Habits
• Know Your Goals

Read more in: Goal Setting, Mastering Habits.