“A change in bad habits leads to a change in life.” — Jenny Craig
As a leader and as an employee, we all have habits that can affect our work. Some habits are good, and they can help us in our everyday work. Those habits can be sustained as long as it gives a positive impact in our work. Now, there are also bad habits that can affect our workplace. These habits can make us lessen our productivity. Sometimes, it can entirely reduce our productivity where we finish nothing.
According to a research at Duke University, habits account for about 40 percent of our behaviors. This means that habits play a huge role on our behaviors especially in the workplace. An average working gives about forty (40) hours per week. That’s almost around half of our week excluding the time we sleep. Habits affects our behavior because it shows the things we are used to doing. Of course, as mentioned earlier, there are good and bad habits. As much as possible we would like to change those bad habits to good ones. This in turn would improve our behavior.
Habits come if you consistently do things. In order for us to determine if what we do is a ‘habit’ is if we do things consistently in a span of three weeks. In order for us to unlearn those habits is if we cut the cycle and start creating new; better habits. Of course, in creating new habits, consistency is also key for us to form those new habits. Doing things everyday for three weeks is where we can consider it a habit. During the first few days would be the hard part, if we endure and continue doing those things, it would be a lot easier and we would be accustomed to what we do.
Here are things we can do to unlearn and learn new habits:
1. Accept that these habits aren’t good – know and accept that these habits are what’s limiting us. The first step to unlearn and learn new habits is that we need to accept. If we accept that these habits that we need to change, we will be able to learn the better habits we can practice.
2. Determine what you want to change – once we accept that we have habits we need to change, we need to determine what those are. We can list them down and focus what on what we can better replace these habits with.
3. Motivate yourself – during the first phase of unlearning these bad habits, it would be hard. We need to trust in ourselves and believe that we will be able to overcome these habits. We have ourselves to believe in, if we really want to change for the better, there will be ways for us to change.
4. Envision what you’ll be after your change – when we try to change our bad habits with good ones, we can envision on what will happen if we successfully practice better habits. This will help us better know what we will achieve when we change those habits.
5. Plan and be ready to accept failure – unlearning and learning new habits won’t be a walk in the park. There will be setbacks and we have to plan what would be our course of action when we face them. We also need to be ready to accept those setbacks so that we can move forward and continue to learn and unlearn those habits.
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