Track your habits: If you were to ask any person about the things they do most consistently, they would probably give you generic answers. “I always eat healthily”. “I always work out consistently”. “My marriage is great, but don’t ask my wife”.
But if you ask these people how they know this, they have no answer. They have no evidence for their supposedly consistent lifestyle. And you will find they often follow up their answers with frustration. “I always eat healthily, but I don’t know why I can’t lose weight!” “I workout consistently, but I don’t know why I am not making progress”. “My marriage is great, but I don’t know why my wife never wants to have sex”.
The truth is that we are not nearly as consistent as we think we are when it comes to our habits.
Our consistency may be hit-and-miss, but as long as we are doing our habit a few times here and there we think we are hitting it consistently. When left to our own devices, we think we are demi-gods who never miss workouts, eat perfectly, have the best marriage, and work 20 hours per day. The truth is that we workout 2-3 times per week, and only one of those sessions is actually effortful. We eat one good meal in the morning, but every night we eat a buffet in our homes. Or we live in relative peace with our wife, but we simply are not engaging in enough masculine behavior to arouse her. And we work about 4 hours per day at max and then waste the rest of the day on frivolities.
The reason for this discrepancy between what we think we do and what we actually do is rooted in the fact that we have no system to measure our behaviors. We have no tool that keeps us grounded in reality when it comes to our habits. I am going to suggest a habit tracking system here that I have used for years. You can use any type that you want, but it is very important that you have this system. It keeps you honest, preventing you from thinking you are never missing workouts when you are regularly missing workouts.
First, get a blank notebook. It does not matter what kind. It could be college ruled, wide ruled, graph rule or you could get one of those small, lined journals. On each line, you are going to write the habits you think are valuable that you want to start. I would suggest that you write down several habits you already do consistently. This will give you some positive reinforcement when you can effortlessly put checks beside those habits. Hopefully one of those habits is daily Bible reading and prayer. Maybe after that, you put exercise and meditation. Then put journaling, visualization, guitar, or exercise in there.
If you are just starting some of these behaviors limit yourself to 3-6 habits. You do not want to burn out after a week or two and quit all your new behaviors before you reap the rewards from them. Start small, there is nothing wrong with placing small amounts of money in an investment account. These habits are the investment account for your life, and they will pay you dividends down the line.
Just track your habits and you will make progress.
Now that you have made a short list of the habits you already have and the ones you are going to start, write the date on the line below all of them. You are not going to write a date for every day, the point is to be able to get a generalized view of how you perform over time.
Now for the fun part, every time you complete a behavior, put a small check beside it. It seems silly, but that simple act of checking off a behavior is rewarding and will encourage you to check it off again. Now all you have to do is keep checking off behaviors. Lose yourself in the process of just checking off each habit each day. Learn to love the small steps and progress you are making towards your goals.
Here is another option for habit tracking you may be interested in:
On the rest of the paper below your check-off list, write down your observations about yourself or other personal development notes. Make notes about what you notice happens that causes you to miss a habit. What gets in the way of you completing your goals? Are the habits too big and need to be broken down into smaller more manageable chunks? Perhaps you started too many habits at once and need to put a few of them on hold. Is the time of day that you perform your habits so scattered that you cannot guarantee that you will complete your tasks?
The purpose of the notes is to analyze your own behavior and see where you are coming up short.
Where are the bottlenecks in your protocols? What is keeping you from making better progress in your life? The fastest way to improve is actually to eliminate a negative, not build a positive. By that I mean it is easier for us as humans to break something down than to build something up. So why not break down something negative before building something positive?
By analyzing when you make mistakes, you can prepare for next time. Learn to be a strategic thinker about the machine of your body. Learn what to do when your machine is not operating normally or the way you want it to. Write down ideas for how you can push yourself to complete your habits even on the days you do not want to. This ensures steady progress. It also helps you build great willpower. There is nothing more satisfying than finishing a task or completing your habits on the days when you were not feeling like doing anything. If you can override your own desire for comfort just for a moment, you are building the strength of character and of the mind.
As you track habits, you will notice that many of them become automatic.
This is good and the whole point of tracking them. You want to get to the point where you can complete your habits without needing willpower or motivation. Also be ready, because this is the point where other people will begin to compliment you for your “talent” or “gifts” even though you know your habits are the result of persistence. Anytime people want to excuse their own mediocrity, they complement the natural ability of others. Because if you are not gifted, the only thing separating them from you is a certain volume of work. They cannot blame their “lousy genetics” or lack of ability for mediocrity, they can only blame their unwillingness to put in the effort to be more than they currently are.
Never be angry at those people, in fact, be excited. They demonstrate by their very words that they will never be competition for you. They will always assume that the difference between them and the great men of this world is natural ability. Until they can correct their mind and accept that what separates them from the greats is simply work volume, they will forever be mediocre. They will forever live in your shadow, and you have nothing to fear from them in the marketplace.
All this started from simply tracking your habits. So start the habit of habit tracking and you will reap the rewards for it later in life.
