Saturday, March 20, 2010

Pegging a Habit and helping the Townwide Fund of Huntington

It is a beautiful day here. It started with a 4 mile St. Patrick's Run to benefit the Townwide Fund of Huntington Great day for it. I finished in 29:40 which is not a bad time for me. I placed 74th out of 374 runners.

I am very big on Success Habits. One of my favorite quotes comes from Aristotle:
"We are the product of what we repeatedly do."

Much of our success is as a result of our habits and many people who are unsuccessful, it's only small things they do everyday. So by studying this I believe we can have more success.

The challenge I've had is actually creating a habit. The most obvious way to do this is through discipline and it would be great if we all had unlimited discipline (but I know I don't).

Another challenge I've had is I often want to implement more than one habit at a time (although some experts don't recommend this) and so it becomes difficult to remember all the habits and I would spend all my time reviewing the habits and not enough habits getting my regular life done.

The simplest way that I know to create a habit is to do what I call 'Peg It'.

That's pegging one habit to another habit that is already ingrained.

The simplest one of these that I've done is the habit of deep breathing. I know deep breathing is good for me but I often end up breathing shallowly. So I simply have a habit everytime I sit down I breathe deeply and simply taking that one deep breath often reminds me I should breathe better in general. Even if it doesn't it's one more deep breath than I would have had otherwise.

Another simple habit is doing ten pushups before I go to bed. I often find by the time I get to 10, I often do more. But I do go to bed everyday so it's simple to peg the pushups with my going to bed.

So the message here is simply to think of the things you do repeatedly (stop at a red light, sit down, get out of a car, get into a car, brush your teeth, go to bed, wake up, stop at a red light etc.) and peg the good habit you're trying to develop to that.


1 comment:

  1. Hi.
    That was quite an innovative idea of pegging. I think you just showed me a way to start sorting out my life.

    ReplyDelete