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Creating Good Habits
Creating Good Habits from Weston Jolly on Vimeo.
Creating Good Habits is made easy when you love what you’re creating. Creating your goals comes in knowing how to participate in the flow. Becoming a Master of Creating Good Habits is exciting and fun when you realize that habits don’t need to rule you.
Your health is an absolute byproduct of your habits. (Yep, this includes your weight.) So is your financial abundance. Your habits actually determine the road to your happiness. Think about it.
Thinking positively is as much a habit as going to the gym. Meditation is a wonderful habit of training the mind to connect to Source. Leveraging your habits so that they serve you in manifesting your desires is the key. And when it comes to goal setting establishing good habits is the only way.
What are your good habits? What are your bad ones? Do they offset one another? Perhaps you’re not aware some of your own habits. Don’t worry, you’re not the only one.
Listen, or read the full-transcript below, in becoming aware of how to put your good habits to work.
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Thank you for joining us for this podcast episode 034 of
True Connections with Weston Jolly
Transcription: Creating Good Habits
A young man I know spent at least a year training with his dad to compete in his first Iron Man Triathlon. just so you know; triathlons are split up to three categories; almost a mile of swimming, 24 miles of biking followed by a six mile run. Those who want to up the ante, call the event Iron Man. These athletes swim almost 4 miles, bike up to 110 miles, and run the same distance as a marathon, that is 26 miles.
To give you the feel of training for the Iron Man, consider the following outline in preparation for such an event.
Monday: 2.5 miles of swimming followed by an hour run.
Tuesday: Running faster on the track. A 2.5 hour swim. Lastly, some strength training.
Wednesday: 3 miles in the pool, with 4 to 5 hours of biking in the mountains.
Thursday: Normal swimming, in case you’ve forgotten that’s another 2.5 miles, a two hour bike ride. And then an easy hour run.
Friday: 3 miles of swimming with a two hour run.
Saturday: Not much. Today is a recoup day.
Sunday: A two-hour ride with 90 minutes of higher-intensity riding followed by a 30-minute tempo run off the bike. In the afternoon, an easy swim before doing it all over again on Monday.
Let me continue. The purpose in offering this presentation is all about creating good habits. Good habits support your goals. Bad ones don’t.
See… that wasn’t so bad. Certainly that statement is easy to remember. Good habits support your goals and bad ones don’t. I purposely delayed publishing this podcast to allow you the first week of January. This space hopefully provided you some focused time and attention in contemplating what you want to create.
I should confess, that I am skipping the “how to create a goals” part of the process. But allow me to review, that it isn’t a goal unless it’s written it down. Further, if you’re really interested in achieving your goals there’s a time allocation associated with them. I don’t know many quarterbacks who want to make a goal… sometime in their life. Goals are very specific.
If I’m playing tennis, my goal may be to serve fifteen aces in my first match. The goal is clear, has a time limit on it, and it’s measurable. What I mean by measurable is if I served two aces above my goal or I fell short by three serves. Either way, it’s very easy and clear to measure.
Let me summarize that your setting a goal, no matter what it is, is important. Let your goal be clear. Write it down. And give your goal a time limit.
In this podcast, I want to focus on the process of creating your goals. Most specifically creating good habits to support your goals. Of the people who write their goals down, and this is a very low percentage, most have trouble in keeping their goals in focus because they have poor habits. Writing a goal down and haphazardly hoping that it comes to fruition isn’t going to work.
I realize that there can be a lot of resistance to the idea of creating a system towards what you want but I’d ask that you put away contrarian views. You don’t want to be resisting the very thing that you want or desire —do you? Great, come forward and let me share with you how creating habits to support your goals.
First, any process, regardless of the kind, can be viewed as a discipline. If you have any issues with control, which is addressed in my very first podcast entitled Do you have to be in Control. Consider re-reading the transcript or re-listening to the podcast. For reference, you’ll find this URL on this podcast page.
If somehow in your past, structure has been associated as a constraint, let me share with you right now that you can create any process you want in support of your goals. This means you are free to create processes which are fun, exciting and absolutely aligned with your goals. That said, I am going to share with you several suggestions in how to create your supporting habits but please feel free to adjust and to create anything as you desire.
Let’s start with an example. I’m going put forth a goal. This goal is to meditate every day for an hour. We should observe that it’s a good goal in that it’s clear, it’s simple to remember and has a specific time frame. But how do you implement a process for such a goal?
Perhaps you could read this goal first thing in the morning and go to a quiet place and begin meditating. If that works, in conjunction with the rest of your schedule, go for it. Did you notice the little condition of what I just said? The part about … your new goal working with the rest of your schedule or routine? Your goals have to fit into a working part of your day otherwise they will be immediately rejected in the idea that you don’t have time.
This means a good goal, such as meditating for an hour every day, might be immediately thrown into the trash because there’s no place for it with your other daily activities. This is the real reason I wanted to make; Creating Good Habits. Your new goals have to find themselves in the flow of your life otherwise no new goals will stick.
How can you create a habit of meditating an hour each day? Let’s see if some of these processes or habits might interest you. A goal, such as meditating every day, could be considered altruistic. This means is really sounds good, and it certainly has wonderful benefits for you and others around you, but it may not be personal enough. What about meditating on different subjects?
What if you started the month of January by meditating on new beginnings? It’s the start of the new year. You could call this time of year a new beginning. Why not make it a part of the process of this goal to meditate for an hour every day.
Imagine having a theme of things to meditate on during the month of January. Make it simple, every week in January represents a season throughout the year. Your first week of meditation is about new beginnings. The second week of your meditation is focused on blossoming and blooming. Springing all your creations into life.
Your third week of meditation is filled with play. Summertime is a great time to explore. Perhaps travel. Be outside. Go to a lake or the ocean.
Your fourth week of meditation now shifts to winter. The beauty of winter in how Fall slowly drops the leaves of Spring to enter a time of contemplation. This season easily incorporates being thankful. For food. Housing, Health. Relationships.
You may find that meditating for only one week on an entire season to be easy but then again you may find there isn’t enough time to cover a whole season in a week. Yet, did you find the concept helpful? Suddenly, there’s a purpose in meditating an hour every day. If you wanted to keep going you could make mini themes for each day. Or maybe you’ll want to keep a journal of things that come up during each day after you meditate?
Well, that was easy wasn’t it? Taking a good goal, and making it personal, fun, measurable and supporting it with a process that’s personal will really make an impact in your manifestations.
Okay, let’s examine another example. Let’s say you’re thinking about reshaping your body. I’ve worked with scores of people in this category, quite successfully I might add. The easiest way for you to achieve new body is to make it a fun process. Let’s assume you wanted to loose 20 pounds within 60 days. It’s doable but there must be a consistency if the weight loss to occur or last.
This is why there are so many fads surrounding, what I call, “The Get It Now -Concept”. Instant gratification has been promoted in many industries from; credit cards that advertise “you can it right now,” get rich quick programs, fast food, diet plans that guarantee excessive weight loss in days, to dating apps such as Tinder that promotes a date, or even sex, right now.
Setting a goal and appreciating its immediate accomplishment is rad. For the record, so is applying yourself and reaching the goal in whatever time it takes to achieve it. This second category is especially exciting when you see your measured results building into your goal.
When it comes to reshaping the body there are a few things that commonly arise.
They are; 1.) The thought that loosing weight is competitive to another thought or value. 2.) Individuals can’t see or don’t appreciate their results, 3.) There is no habit or plan to follow beyond hope. And as they say, “hope isn’t a plan.”
If you expect all your goals to instantly materialize you’re bound to become disappointed. Once you’re disillusioned, you’ll absolutely quit your goal with some variation of “It’s not working.” This habit creates an embitterment, the expectation that everything happens instantly, and it kills any chance for anything to be created beyond the moment.
This is where you hear thoughts such as; “I’ve tried everything.” I’m asking that you step away from instant gratification and look to the process of creating an extraordinarily good habit. What does this look like? It means every day is a deposit of your creating what you want.
It’s not measured with instant gratification. In fact, the tools of measurement comes in observing and tweaking the process. If you wanted to loose weight the first thing I tell you to do is throw away the scale. I’d like to focus your attention on something even more important than how much you weigh.
Can you guess what this might be? If you said, feeling good then you’re reading my mind. That’s a good thing and perhaps a topic we can talk about in the future. (Laughter.) While feeling good is critically important a lot of people find it hard to measure.
Since there isn’t a, how good are you feeling scale, a lot of people put forth what they want to feel instead of actually stating things for what they are. I mentioned this hardily in the last podcast of entitled, Reflections. Do you remember the Skinny Mirror?
For those of you who haven’t listened or read the podcast, the Skinny Mirror is deceptive. It reflects that you are skinny when in fact you’re not. We want to utilize measurement systems that don’t lie, or deceive and we want to get excited about creating tangible steps towards our results. In terms of weight loss, I’d toss out the scale as the tool to measure and have anyone in this category considering measuring themselves.
This means measuring yourself with a tape measure. It doesn’t take that long and there’s no deceiving the tape and most of all, generally speaking, there are no negative associations with this measuring device. If you want to loose weight, you’ll see it by very specific body measurements as the pounds drop away.
Taking pictures works too. If you’re going to employ this method take your camera and stand in the same position, with the same lighting, and take your pictures in weekly intervals. You would think that being in your body would allow you to see it change but sometimes you literally are too close to the trees to see the forest.
Certainly, employing good habits is done with positive reinforcement. But you should absolutely expect there to days, especially when it’s your body, when you may “think” that there is no change when you only loose only a 1/4” off your arms but it’s all working as a part of the process towards your goal. Further, if you have neutral results and your measurements are null or even the opposite keep creating those good habits because if they are good, they will create what you want.
Those who manage money know that creating good habits in wealth is critically important even if you inherited it all. Without creating good habits the likelihood of your keeping your capital, let alone growing it, is without form. Getting rich is about cultivating great habits that make it easier and easier for you, so that your money is actually working for you.
This is a novel concept to the poor, because they often think they don’t have any, but to anyone with substance the idea of money working for you is by far the easiest way. Naturally, the more money you have, the easier your habit of earning money becomes. This habit goes hand and hand with creating abundance. Think of it this way, each dollar you have is offered direction, via your goals, and that simply is to reproduce.
If you’re seriously interested in learning more about abundance consider making the purchase of Time to Be Rich. You can download the book, Time To Be Rich, right now at Amazon or purchase it from my website. It’s a insignificant investment to creating riches. If you want even faster results, grab the audio book from my website. If you follow the concise steps in this book you’ll observe the very outline of creating good habits that I’m speaking about.
I want to circle back to the beginning. You remember my friend wanting to enter his first Iron Man event? Well, let me tell you the rest of the story. His daily practice wasn’t perfect. Far from it. But he did create a series of habits that he followed and tracked.
As he was running in the last leg of his first Iron Man, he thought about quitting. To be honest, he’d thought about quitting while swimming in the first leg and also in the second leg of bicycling. When I asked him what was it that kept in the event, he stated stoically, “The T-Shirts.” I said, the T-Shirts? What do you mean.
My young friend told me that he’d purchased about $150 worth of Iron Man paraphernalia. I still didn’t get it, so he continued… “You know T-shirts, hats, pins, pictures etc.” I said, “Okay you bought a bunch of stuff surrounding the race. “You could take it all back.” “No, I couldn’t,“ he said. I couldn’t see myself returning all those things so I kept running.
I laughed and laughed at this response. The real reason he was able to finish his goal is because he created good habits. They work. Best of all they’ll work for you even if you don’t want to swim, bike or run. They’ll work for you in any goal that you put forth.
In conclusion, creating good habits is all about making the process or the flow or the habit fun. The more you practice the greater the probability of making your goal come true. It works with any goal you choose. I will be talking in the future about creating good habits specific to your spiritual practice. Today, I think it’s vitally important to remember that creating good habits is the bedrock to the flow.
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