HABITS AREN’T THE ANSWER

Honestly, there are just 1000s upon 1000s of videos on the internet that tell you what habits you need to adopt in order to be successful. And, look, I’m a guilty party here because I have created some of these videos in the past. 

The only problem is, when it comes to habit videos, I actually consider this to be feel-good content rather than actually helpful content that is going to help YOU change YOUR life. The reason is, we feel good when we think that we know what made someone successful. So when we see someone who is a millionaire or a successful YouTuber, or is in really fit healthy shape, we think that if we know the way that they eat, how they sleep, how they spend their morning, how they spend their evening, that we have some kind of blueprint to their success. 

But instead of getting a blueprint for success, we’re actually setting ourselves up for failure. Because what actually happens so much of the time is we think that it’s the habits that have made someone successful rather than the mindset that leads them to be able to take the actions required for their personal success. 

For example, a lot of people think that a morning routine, or waking up early is a habit that helps people to be successful. But if you’re someone who is trying to build your career as a late-night performer, and the performances that you want to do late-nights, and they go into the early hours of the morning, telling you to wake up at 5 am to “be more successful” is terrible advice, because it’s probably going to mean that you are under sleeping and therefore going to lead to burnout and not be able to actually pursue your career passion at all.

Or telling people that they need to read more books. Sure it does help to shape and mold your perspective on life. But if you are trying to become a professional lacrosse player telling you to read more books could actually be a massive waste of time. So the thing is, it’s not necessarily what we do that makes us successful. And there are no commonalities among people who are successful in terms of the daily habits that they have other than the one habit of taking the action that they need to take on the thing that is going to make them successful. 

See, the thing with these habits videos is that we think if I wake up on time, if I wake up early, if I read more, if I meditate more, then I can be successful, like x person, but are those habits actually keeping you from doing the thing that you actually need to do for your success. And so, following some kind of blueprint or what people do is not the thing that is going to make you successful. The thing that is going to make you successful is who you become and your ability to take action on the things that you need to do.

5 MINDSET & IDENTIFY SHIFTING PRACTICE FOR SUCCESS

1)  SELF-TALK

You need to become obsessed with monitoring the way that you speak to yourself. Because the stories that you are consistently telling yourself are making up how you see yourself and how you see yourself determines the actions you take. And therefore, the results that you get. 

If you can change the story that you have about yourself, you will be able to achieve anything in life. But this is so boring. Let me tell you, being like a drill sergeant watching and listening to every single thought that you have, takes so much work. And this is the reason why most people don’t do it. Even though it could be the thing that completely shifts your life. And it’s not difficult to do, it’s just that you have to do it all day, every single day, until you start noticing those changes in yourself. This is a practice called automaticity. 

But in the beginning, it will take discipline and conscious action for you to rewire certain parts of your brain. But what actually happens over time is that those neural pathways become your natural way of being. So it doesn’t require as much effort for you to do the thing. 

Think about anything that you do in your life right now, driving, cleaning your teeth, you don’t have to berate yourself into taking that action because it’s just a part of who you are, you can get to that point with anything. Whether it be showing up on social media, whether it be going to the gym, you may have resistance around right now because it takes conscious effort and discipline for you to be able to take those actions. But if you are able to be super militant with the thoughts and the stories that you’re telling yourself every single day, and using statements like “I am someone who goes to the gym effortlessly, I love working out, I’m in the best shape of my life,” rather than “I’m so lazy,” because if there are the thoughts that you are having, of course, you’re going to have resistance towards anything that rebuts that. But if you see yourself as someone who is fit, healthy and effortlessly moves their body every single day, then ultimately, you’ll find less resistance in taking that action. So not everything needs to be such an effort. 

This is what I have been doing: I have five statements that I’m particularly working on. One is around being healthy and working out. One is about growing my wealth and growing my business. One is about growing my influence. One is about feeling safe and secure to be successful. Anytime I catch myself getting lost in thought, I am repeating to myself these statements. Because I am trying to shift my identity toward the person that I want to be.

Whenever you are having any type of thought pattern or conversation with yourself, try to move it in a more positive identity-shifting direction, especially when you start to build those yourself, meaning that you start to go down negative pathways or you start to talk negatively to yourself, pause for a moment and shift it more to a positive statement. 

2) IDENTIFY & INVESTIGATE SELF-SABOTAGE

Self-Sabotage is such a sneaky little minx, honestly, like you don’t even realize most of the time when you are sabotaging yourself because our brains actually have a really clever way of disguising self-sabotage. And so you have to be really good at being able to identify when your brain is trying to distract you from the person you want to be or the things that you’re trying to achieve. 

Now, to give you an example of this, recently, I have actually started living so many of my dreams have come true. And because, of course, I’m aware of the dangerous interruption of self-sabotage, I noticed that my brain was trying to create problems where there wasn’t one. 

For example, my brain locked on to a situation with a friend of mine that normally wouldn’t even cross my mind whatsoever. But because it was the only “negative” thing happening in my life, my brain started to ruminate on it and catastrophize around it and obsess about this. And I really had to stop, pause and recognize that this was a form of self-sabotage, trying to keep me from the momentum of the growth that I am achieving and experiencing in my life right now. 

Our brain will start to s
abotage our happiness, but it will We’ll also start to sabotage our growth. So if you aren’t trying to work out more, maybe you are doing things that are going to lead to you getting sick. Or maybe if you’re trying to show up online more, you’re unconsciously saying yes to too many things and therefore getting too busy to create content. So you really have to identify anything that is pulling you away, any thought patterns, any lifestyle changes, or really anything that is pulling you away from who you want to be and what you’re trying to achieve. 

And a really easy way to identify this is just to stop and have a reflection on your days and your weeks and ask yourself: Where was I distracted from my goals, and who was I trying to be? 

And when you do identify self-sabotage, you need to either work through the mindset limitations that are causing that self-sabotage or just try to push through so you can actually take action regardless. 

3) MENTAL REHEARSAL

This is from the book Psycho-Cybernetics that I spoke about in my most recent book video, but I really liked this practice. And it’s so incredibly powerful. 

I’m sure you’ve heard of the term visualization, everyone knows what visualization is, but visualization can be really overwhelming. Just to sit down and visualize your dream life. A lot of the time, for me, I don’t even know what to pick.  It seems overwhelming, am I supposed to just like, cram the next 20 years of what I want to experience into a 10-minute meditation? And so if you’re like me, and you’re finding that visualization is hard to do, mental rehearsal is actually a much better practice. 

Something that you can do to help you step into that new identity of yourself is you can actually take scenarios, and you can rehearse them in your mind. For example, if I am someone who is trying to get to the point where I’m hosting global events, and I really want to meet my community all over the world, all of my members and my chillpreneur membership, and I really want to bring people together and teach them in this live environment, what I would do is I would take that one scenario, and I would essentially rehearse in my mind how that scenario would play out. 

Now the thing is, we already do this. But unfortunately, we use this skill most of the time in a negative way. How many times have you sat there with the potential of something going wrong, going over and over and over all the possibilities of that outcome? 

You’re probably doing this all day, every day anyway, because we have a negativity bias, and we like to kind of prepare ourselves for situations, but what you’ve got to do is just be a little bit more disciplined in trying to do the same thing. But for positive situations in your life. 

The reason why this is so powerful is that I’m sure you’ve heard your subconscious mind doesn’t know the difference between reality and what’s going on in your thoughts, what’s going on in your feelings and your emotions. And there are lots of studies to show that people who have mentally rehearsed for things like basketball or playing the piano are getting just as good results as people who are actually out there practising. 

And so when you are training your brain or rehearsing these scenarios, you’re more likely to shift into that identity and therefore pick up opportunities that will lead to that thing because your subconscious just thinks that’s who you are. 

4) TWO-PATH DECISION-MAKING METHOD

Basically, what this is, generally, when you are making decisions, there are only two options, right? There’s either to do the thing or to not do the thing. It’s to choose this thing or to choose that thing. Generally, there are only two options. A lot of the time, the decisions that we’re making in our day-to-day is very emotionally based. So we’re going and making decisions based on what we feel like doing at the moment. 

What you want to start doing in the new year is anytime you are faced with a decision, rather than just letting your emotions run the show, you actually want to pause for a moment, and you want to visualize two paths: one decision is going to lead to one destination, the other decision is going to lead to another destination. And then you need to ask yourself if I make one decision, I’m going to head down this path, which is keeping me where I am and therefore giving me the results that I currently have. Or if I make the other decision, shifting into an iterated version of my identity. 

Every single decision you make is like opening a new door to your new identity, and your new identity is what is going to create your new reality. And so it’s just about making conscious decisions. 

If both options are desirable to you, it’s just one is easier, but one is better for you in the long run, the decision doesn’t have to be as difficult. 

5) DAILY BELIEF EXPANSION

In order for you to be able to take the action in life to get the results that you desire, you have to believe that the thing that you’re doing could lead to the result that you desire. If you don’t believe that showing up every day on Instagram is going to grow the following that will allow you to have the impact on the world that you desire, or creating and selling a product is going to allow you to build a business that will ultimately lead to your freedom, passive lifestyle…If you don’t personally believe that these actions you take and the work that you’re doing are going to lead to the desired result that you have, you will always come up against resistance and sabotage. 

And so, one thing that you can really do is expand your possibility of belief. When you believe more, taking action is easier. And so I’m actually trying to include daily belief expanding. So yes, it’s going to be a lot of the work that we already spoke about, like mental rehearsal or shifting my identity with self-talk. However, one thing that I’m also doing is surrounding myself with examples of what I want.  I’m reading stories of successful entrepreneurs that have grown these big companies and trying to have more conversations with people who’ve been on the path that I desired to go on myself.