How to Create and Cultivate a Daily Habit

For anyone out of the loop that overlooked my profile, I do a few things every single day of my life. For one, I go out and socialize.

Either at a mall or some day event, or a night venue such as a club/bar. I exercise every single day. 9 times out of 10 I’m in the gym (when I’m cramped for time you’ll see me jogging and doing some pushups afterwards). I read every day.

As I stated in my Walking Your Path article, and the article about Consistency, I perceive these habits to be a major factor in shaping my life, my identity, my character, my beliefs, my values, my morals, etc…

Obviously there’s a slew of other factors but these 3 are my keys to life, my keys to personal success.

A lot of people see that I do these things daily and their brain start’s spewing out negative thought’s and ideas. “I could never do that”, “Wow what a work a holic, glad I spend my life doing other stuff” “He must never have any free time” etc…

Obviously these are all false assumptions. I’m a 19 year old (and barley 19) young adult. I was a pretty average dude growing up.

Sure I had my ups, but had just as many downs as anyone else, if not more.

What I’m getting at here is that if I can do it, so can you. The only thing fundamentally stopping you, is yourself.

So what this article is about is giving you details and specifics and examples on how to implement daily habits into your life. How to do something 7 days a week, for a set amount of time. That thing, can be anything you desire.

The amount of time can be life long, a few months, or a few years. It’s up to you to decide.

First off, there are 2 ways to approach this (commonly practiced anyways).

One, is a trial run of the habit. Most common, a 30 day challenge. These are becoming more and more popular. A good read on them can be found at

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/04/30-days-to-success/

The second train of thought is a more accept it and burn the boat mentality, a somewhat relevant read can be found at

http://www.realsocialdynamics.com/community/showthread.php?t=77

Both have their scientific evidence that support their respective idea. With the 30 day challenge the idea is to build a neural pathway as Tony Robbins calls it, build the habit.

Evidence basically says the amount of days to create this neural pathway ranges from individual to individual, 10, 21, 30, x days.

With the burn the boat mentality, for me anyways, it’s like your disconnecting a *neural pathway* in your head, your just cutting something loose. Simple, ballsy, and efficient.

I’ve tested and tried both.

My more well known 30 day challenges have been *Energy boost*, which is where I ran every morning in March of 07 for about 20 minutes.

The other was just going out as many days in a row as possible. I got to 22 nights in a row back in June of 07 (although I’m going to shatter that little record now lol), before running into summer school.

What has worked for me (very well)), works for me (very well), and will continue to work for me well as far as I can see in my future, is a combination of the 2 schools of thought.

The basic rule is that will power can not last. Only a compelling future can.

Will power will get you through a 30 day challenge, but it will not support you forever if you decide to take on something for an extended period of time, including a life-long daily habit.

What I noticed is that I gradually built up to my daily habits, without knowing it. With going out, I started really slow, like 1 day a week I would go out and talk to some people. Eventually after a few weeks, 2 days a week.

After a few months of that, I went to college and started going out 3-5 days a week.

After many months of that I tried a 30 day challenge as just mentioned and went out 22 nights in a row. Ended that and went back to my old 3-5 day habit of going out and socializing.

Problem is though, I want mastery.

What’s the one constant that all masters have?

Going out 7 days a week for many, many months.

So, I started going out 7 nights a week last month and haven’t missed a day yet.

Had I tried that early on, I would have failed miserably. Even in June I wasn’t able to make it past 22 for one reason or another.

But, those references gave me strength to burn the boat, and forget how to swim. Now I’m in neck deep with going out, and it’s going to be a while.

I understand this, accept it for what it is, and enjoy every minute of it.

Exercising daily followed a similar path. For years I worked out on and off for football, few days a week. I never did much outside of what the coaches required though.

Once I hurt my knee for the final time my senior year I had an identity crisis, and shift, and began working out on my own.

For the next year and a half I worked out a few days a week, some days more intensely than others, some less.

In March I made the firm decision I wanted to trim down a little bit though (5’10 185 pounds) and ran every single morning for 20 minutes. Didn’t care about anything, I ran no matter how late I went to bed or how early I had to take up (curse Sears and there 7 am morning meetings LOL).

Believe it or not adding this on top of my regular workouts didn’t accomplish much physically, but it did strengthen me mentally, a ton.

When I moved into Project Orlando with Slikk (early may) I accepted the fact that to achieve my fitness and vitality goals, I had to work out, every day, the rest of my life.

At this point though I had ton extensive research on this and fully understood how to do this and what effects it would have.

I’ve missed one day since then (was so busy it never even crossed my mind the day after the convention ended lol).

One final example of this is my diet, my consistent eating habits.

In the past year I have made some pretty drastic, and controversial changes in my diet. I cut out a lot of bad, and added a lot of good. I won’t go into specifics but it followed the same path and process.

Gradually started working on and thinking about what I ate, made small steps, some bigger steps towards the end, and finally made the shift into a truly healthy and vibrant lifestyle.

So to summarize what has worked for me in creating consistent daily habits.

• Start out small. Take action but begin gathering information. Whatever you do though, be consistent.
• Start to break down your bigger goals into small ones. Start taking larger steps, consider some timed challenges for yourself.
• Sit down, visualize what you really want, and lay down what needs to be done to accomplish them. What kind of consistent and/or daily habits are required to achieve them.

Not saying this is the ultimate way to build a consistent habit but is what has worked for me in the past, and has yet to fail me.

Live the life you deserve

-Dream