What Are The 10 Bad Habits You Must Eliminate?

It`s the start of a new year. And I don`t know about you, but I am hell-bent on doing a few things differently! I didn`t achieve what I wanted to achieve in 2016, so here goes ‘new stuff’ in 2017. And there`s a great article below that talks about ‘What Are The 10 Bad Habits You Must Eliminate’?

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First about me and I hope some ideas and practices I have are useful for you too!

For me, and perhaps for you too …  the same stuff as last year won`t cut it.  So for what it`s worth! I have 4 goals only for 2017 and I`m deeply committed to achieving lots.  My goals are 90 day goals, or 12 week goals … not 12 month goals!!

I have a clear image or vision about each goal. I`m spending specific times each week on each of these goals!  This is a critical piece of my plan!! This is new from 2016.

I have a written plan, I write it on on A3 sheet divided into quarters.  This is an “ACTION PLAN FOR THE WEEK”. I write each goal and the specific action in each of the 4 quarters. I review my progress at the end of each week, and write the new actions I`ll take for the upcoming week. In other words it`s “practical, it`s about actions”… No more ideas in the head stuff!!

#1 Goal — this is about my health … the last 3, no 4 years have been very bad!  Hospitals, specialists, doctors, pills, pain … so now I`m in a better place.  My plan is about exercise I will do daily, food I`ll eat, sleep I must have, meditation I will do.  My markers are feel energized, and to lose weight.

I have just started week 4 with this goal.  Progress? Slowly I am feeling more energized .. great! Weight-wise … My starting weight 109.3kg.  My weigh-in this morning 105kg. Excellent!  My target is to be at 95kg at the end of 90 days! (ie I`ve lost 4kg =8.8lbs)

#2 Goal is about my business plans and actions

#3 Goal is about relationships with people, family, community, colleagues!

#4 Goal is about ” all the other stuff in life that usually consumes all the time of our days and stops us from achieving the important actions in our lives!

I allocate times for each of the 4 goals on a weekly planner. I must! I need retraining, my brain needs retraining!!  Or I will fail!!

>>> More about my 4 goals in up-coming posts!

Here is an excerpt from an article by one of my “influencers” – Travis Bradberry

He is an award-winning co-author of the best-selling book, Emotional Intelligence 2.0, and the co-founder of TalentSmart — a consultancy that serves more than 75 percent of Fortune 500 companies and is a leading provider of emotional inte…

He writes

You are the sum of your habits. When you allow bad habits to take over, they dramatically impede your path to success. The challenge is bad habits are insidious, creeping up on you slowly until you don’t even notice the damage they’re causing.

“Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.”   — Warren Buffett

Breaking bad habits requires self-control — and lots of it. Research indicates that it’s worth the effort, as self-control has huge implications for success.

Related: 8 Habits of Wildly Successful People

University of Pennsylvania psychologists Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman conducted a study where they measured college students’ IQ scores and levels of self-control upon entering university. Four years later, they looked at the students’ grade point averages (GPA) and found that self-control was twice as important as IQ in earning a high GPA.

The self-control required to develop good habits (and stop bad ones) also serves as the foundation for a strong work ethic and high productivity. Self-control is like a muscle — to build it up you need to exercise it. Practice flexing your self-control muscle by breaking the following bad habits:

1. Using your phone, tablet or computer in bed. 

This is a big one that most people don’t even realize harms their sleep and productivity. Short-wavelength blue light plays an important role in your mood, energy level and sleep quality. In the morning, sunlight contains high concentrations of this blue light. When your eyes are exposed to it directly, the blue light halts production of the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin and makes you feel more alert. In the afternoon, the sun’s rays lose their blue light, which allows your body to produce melatonin and start making you sleepy. By the evening, your brain doesn’t expect any blue light exposure and is very sensitive to it.

Most of our favorite evening devices — laptops, tablets and mobile phones — emit short-wavelength blue light brightly and right in your face. This exposure impairs melatonin production and interferes with your ability to fall asleep as well as with the quality of your sleep once you do nod off. As we’ve all experienced, a poor night’s sleep has disastrous effects. The best thing you can do is to avoid these devices after dinner (television is OK for most people as long as they sit far enough away from the set).

2. Impulsively surfing the internet. 

It takes you 15 consecutive minutes of focus before you can fully engage in a task. Once you do, you fall into a euphoric state of increased productivity called flow. Research shows that people in a flow state are five times more productive than they otherwise would be. When you click out of your work because you get an itch to check the news, Facebook, a sport’s score or what have you, this pulls you out of flow. This means you have to go through another 15 minutes of continuous focus to reenter the flow state. Click in and out of your work enough times, and you can go through an entire day without experiencing flow.

Related: 10 Habits That Will Make You Much Happier

You can read the full article here, thanks for the great contribution you make to the world Travis!  Please follow him!

10 Bad Habits You Must Eliminate From Your Daily Routine