A New Beginning

Bad habits are easy to acquire. They are obtained slowly over time, and they usually remain “invisible” throughout our lives. Most of the time we aren’t aware of them, because they are manifested on a subconscious level. Nevertheless they exist, and they impact every area of our lives. They affect our health, our relationships, our finances, our careers, our hygiene, our physical mannerisms, and even our reputations. Bad habits shape our lives in more ways than we can imagine.

What bad habits do you recognize in your life? Worse yet, what bad habits do others recognize in you that are hidden from your view? A bad habit is any activity that is performed routinely and without thought that can negatively affect your life. But while all of us have a few bad habits, most of us would like to overcome them. Most of us would like to grow and achieve the destiny that God designed us to achieve. We want tomorrow to be better than today. But we know that we are powerless to shape the future unless we can gain control over those pesky habits that rob us of our potential and plague our lives with mediocrity.

So take heart in the fact that bad habits can be overcome once we are able to recognize them. Utilizing the principles that I explain in Make That, Break That, you can replace your bad habits with good ones, and you can write a new script for the rest of your life.

Your bad habits have the power to destroy you, but good habits have the power to overwrite the bad ones and propel you toward greatness. So make an effort to learn how habits are formed in your life and how you can circumvent that process to develop the habits you want. Don’t settle for the status quo.

You've Got the Power!

I love this quote from Henry David Thoreau, “The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.” Another way I like to think of it is that if something is of value to you, the cost of that thing is worth it. Whether it costs you time, money, emotion – it is worth that investment.

The vast majority of the things that happen to us result from the choices we have made, the actions we have taken, the words we have uttered, or the attitudes we have exhibited. They flow from our own actions and choices, not circumstances that are beyond our control. Consequently, if we could somehow learn to approach life’s biggest challenges with a positive mindset instead of a negative one – with wisdom instead of imprudent behavior – even the worst experiences in life could end up contributing to our success.

Because it is mostly your choices that have gotten you where you are today, I have great news for you! Based on choices you make today and going forward, you have the power to shape your life to affect your future. You can change direction and move toward a different destination if you want. You have the ability to shape the rest of your life. If you are willing to pay the price today, make the changes, work on changing your focus, and invest in your dream, you can enjoy the benefits of your sacrifice tomorrow. More investment and sacrifice today means greater benefits later. Success. Simple.

We talked about Newton’s Third Law of Motion in an earlier blog and podcast. Some people are smart enough and charming enough to fool the people around them and seemingly get by without paying the price, but ultimately, there is no way around it. If you have the rare ability to charm your way into certain places, you may be tempted to think you can bypass the Third Law of Motion. Never forget that you may be able to fool people – maybe all of the time – but you cannot fool life. The laws of nature are firmly established. Just as the land is programmed to reproduce the seeds that are planted in it, so life is programmed to give you back an equal and opposite dosage of what you have put into it. Your success will be in direct proportion to the effort you put forth and the price you are willing to pay to obtain the success you achieve. Controlling your thinking is imperative. If your life is directed by the mechanics of your subconscious rather than your deliberate choices, you are not controlling your own thinking. You must be willing to replace old ways of thinking with new ways of thinking. Identify and deal with those recurring thoughts that are depleting your mental energy and hindering you from pursuing better things. Build relationships that will help you change. Explore new ideas. Think positively in order to give yourself a fighting chance to achieve your goals. Break out of the entrapment of limited thinking so you can see beyond the horizon. Employ personal vision. The person who can keep their eyes peeled on the prize will find ways around problems and will make progress toward their desired destination. Be willing to do what it takes. All things are possible for one who refuses to focus on the bitter parts of life, focusing instead on life’s possibilities.

When all is said and done, action is essential to success. Act on the things you have discovered and take initial steps to implement the thoughts you have entertained as you have read Mindset Matters. If you haven’t bought the book yet, make sure to get a copy at davemartin.org, amazon.com, or anywhere books are sold. Remember. Change your mind. Change your world.

Triggered Rewards

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that a lot of research has been conducted on the process of habit formation. We humans develop habits quite easily, and scientists have wanted to know why. So years of research have helped psychologists discover a pattern in human behavior called the “habit loop.”

The “habit loop” works like this: The brain records the feelings that a person has whenever that person performs a certain behavior. The brain also remembers the circumstances that gave rise to that behavior. So whenever a person responds to a situation in a particular way and then has a good feeling as a result of his actions, the person’s brain records the experience. Then, the next time the person faces a similar situation, his brain remembers the action he took the last time and prompts him to take that same action again.

When a repetitive behavior produces a positive feeling each time a person performs it, that person’s brain causes him to form a habit. And that explains the “habit loop” that governs our lives. A certain “trigger” (or “cue” or “reminder”) will cause a person to perform the behavior that his brain has attached to that trigger, and then the “reward” that he experiences will reinforce that behavior in his subconscious.

This is why you perform habitual behaviors without even thinking about them. But the good news is that a person can circumvent this process to force himself to learn good habits instead of bad ones. The key is to find a “trigger” that will help you perform the behavior you want to perform and then find a “reward” that will reinforce that behavior in your life. If you do this long enough, the behavior will become permanent, and you will perform it routinely without even thinking about it. And good habits can enhance your life.

Repetitive Organization

One of the things I explain in Make That, Break That is that bad habits are overcome, not by trying to defeat them, but rather by “overwriting” them with better habits. Once a person understands how habits are created and then utilizes that newfound knowledge to develop the kinds of habits that he wants, that person’s bad habits will tend to fade away.

In Make That, Break That, I also delve into the different areas of life where new habits can be beneficial and where their creation can have a domino effect of giving rise to even more good habits. And one of those areas where a new habit can have an ongoing effect is in the area of organization.

Most of us are terribly disorganized. And while it would not be good for us to totally abandon those spontaneous aspects of life that make life worth living, we often create more stress for ourselves than we ought because we are disorganized in everything we do.

Just think about it! Up to 90 percent of what you do in your life is repetitive. You brush your teeth every day, you eat every day, you go to school or to work almost every day, and you go to bed every night. But while these parts of our lives are the parts we do “automatically” and without thought, the irony is that these parts of our lives are the parts that are most important, because these repetitive parts of our lives are the parts that affect all the other parts.

It is vital, therefore, that we forge good habits of organization. It is vital that we create habitual behaviors in the repetitive parts of our lives so the non-repetitive parts can be more productive and more fulfilling. Wise is the person who maximizes his health and happiness by minimizing his stress.

Manage It Well

Next to health, I don’t know any other area of life that causes people more concern than money. Solomon wrote in the Bible, “Money is the answer for everything” (Ecclesiastes 10:19, NIV). And what he meant by that statement is that money, properly handled, can solve many of the problems we experience in life. With an ample supply of money and with the wisdom to use it rightly, a person is more likely to be happy, healthy, and fulfilled. But with an insufficient supply of money, the problems of life are multiplied.

This is why it is so important for us to develop good financial habits in our lives. Some of us spend money emotionally. Others of us stay in debt because we have no ability to delay our own gratification. Still others fail to save or invest, because they do not understand the combined power of time and compound interest. And still others have no idea where their money goes. They make a lot, but they spend more than they make, and they have no idea how it disappears so quickly.

But while some people live beneath their full potential financially, others have nurtured habits that serve them well in this important aspect of life. These people have learned to respect money and to understand how it can work for them instead of against them if they will only practice those behaviors of earning and spending that have proven to be reliable over the centuries. So in Make That, Break That, I explore the benefits of developing good financial habits. Nothing can cause more stress in a family than a lack of money or the waste of it. But nothing can create more satisfaction than being able to live free from stress while enriching the lives of those you love through the wealth God has entrusted to you.

Mediocrity vs. Exceptionalism

When I was in school, many years ago… I remember studying Sir Isaac Newton. Specifically, I remember Newton’s Third Law of Motion. Simply stated, when one body exerts a force on another body, the second body simultaneously exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction to that of the first body. In other words, for every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction. This principle is seen in our everyday life when we walk across the floor. As we walk, our body pushes against the floor and the floor pushes back, propelling us forward across the room.

This fixed principle of nature does not apply solely to the physical aspects of life; this law also applies to many of the unseen and non-physical parts of life. To achieve your goals, you also have to push down against the realities that constrain you. Whether talking about physical momentum or life momentum, you cannot propel yourself upward without pushing downward.

Your success in life will be directly proportional to the effort you exert toward the achievement of that success. The obstacles that you encounter in life are there to provide you with the forward momentum you need to achieve great things for yourself, but you must learn to push against these obstacles in order to gain momentum from them by utilizing the opposite force they were designed to create for you.

Remember, anything worthwhile is readily available to the one who will embrace it and is willing to pay the price to attain it. Every great achievement is protected by a high wall of hard work, sacrifice, risk, and delayed gratification. Each person succeeds or fails according to his or her own capacity to visualize where they are going with their life, to force themselves to do what is necessary to begin and compete their journey. Vision alone won’t guarantee success.

Are you ready to break out of the rut of mediocrity and rise to a level of exceptionalism that distinguishes you from 96% of the population? There are things you can do to propel yourself forward. I talk about them in chapter 6 of Mindset Matters. There are ways we can learn to control our thoughts, attitude, limited thinking, wastefulness of resources, and mental laziness. Check out this chapter in Mindset Matters. If you can change your thinking, you can change your world.

The Habit of Reset

The Happy Habit

Make It Automatic

In Make That, Break That, I go into great detail to explain the components of human behavior that cause us to form our habits. I want the reader to understand the unseen dynamics of habit formation so he (or she) can purposely “hijack” these dynamics to form the good habits that he wants. To develop good habits, we must learn to use the same processes that our bodies and brains use every day. We must learn to use the tools that God gave us.

So in my book I teach the various steps that a person needs to follow in order to learn a new behavior over a 13-week period. And though I cannot go into detail in this limited space, I do want prospective readers of the book to know that the first step in habit formation is to strip down the new behavior to its most basic component.

For instance, if you want to develop a new habit in your life, your first goal is not to learn how to perform that behavior; your first goal is to simply learn to remember to perform that behavior. For that reason, you would want to start a new habit of exercising every morning by simply getting up and putting on your running shoes. That’s it! At first, you don’t want to do anything more than that. You want to teach your brain to remember the new behavior. You can expand the behavior after your brain gets “addicted” to the activity.

In my detailed explanations, I go through the whole process of how to make your desired behaviors permanent, automatic, and repetitive without forcing yourself to do things against your will every day. But I need you to know that habits are built slowly, and there’s a science behind the process. Make use of the science, and you will see results.

Resolutions That Work

When most people think about starting a new habit, they think of New Year’s resolutions. But research indicates that 92 percent of New Year’s resolutions fail. And why do they fail? They fail for two reasons.

First, they fail because people make resolutions that are too ambitious. Instead of resolving to create a new habit, they resolve to create a new goal. And goals are big things while habits are tiny things. Second, they fail because the only weapon they have at their disposal is the weapon of willpower. They are determined that they are going to start a new thing in their lives.

But while willpower can provide a good “jump start” in developing a new habit, God didn’t design us to live our lives through the power of a determined will. God created the animals to conserve their energy in the wild, and he created man to conserve his energy, too. For this reason, we are preprogrammed to take the path of least resistance in any matter pertaining to our lives.

So when a person tries to develop a new habit through self-control or through sheer determination, that plan may get him a few miles down the road. But it will never take him far enough to get him to his goal of creating something new in his life. To create a new habit, a person must utilize the God-given processes of the “habit loop,” which are based on the creation of a repetitive behavior that is prompted by some sort of “cue” and sustained by some sort of “reward.”

When we learn to harness the processes of the mind that God gave us instead of fighting them every day of our lives, we can create new habits rather easily. And a whole lot of good habits can eventually steer us toward our bigger goals.

Attention to the Detail

Not long ago I was watching a golf tournament on television, and I noticed something I had never really noticed before. I watched the player who was leading the tournament while he was preparing to take his next shot, and I noticed how meticulously he was preparing himself for that shot.

I think most of us have played golf at one time or another in our lives. If not, we have certainly hit golf balls on a driving range. So most of us know what it is like to stand over a golf ball before taking our swing. But this guy was taking a really long time to get set for his shot. He was considering everything from the slope of the green to the speed of the wind and from the bent of the grass to the humidity in the air.

But then it occurred to me why he was taking so much time to hit his shot. Professional golfers are so good that the difference between winning and losing is often one shot. In fact, a tournament can often come down to missing a 30-foot putt by a quarter of an inch. So for that reason, golfers at the highest levels give careful consideration to every little detail of every shot they hit. They don’t even take a one-inch tap-in for granted.

So golfers know what all of us need to know. In the same way that a golf tournament is comprised of about 260 shots, each one extremely important, so life is comprised of all our little deeds that come together to write the storyline of our lives. If our habits cause us to waste “shots” on things that are steering us away from our goals, those habits must be eliminated. Time is too precious to waste on behaviors that rob our potential.

The Point of Order

Next to losing weight and exercising, the area of life where people seem to need the most help in developing better habits is in the area of organization. People know they are disorganized; they just don’t know what to do about it.

On any given day, a person will spend way too much time fixing the messes that his disorganization has caused and too little time doing the planning and organizing that could prevent these messes from happening. But since we were children, all of us have been conditioned to do things the same way other people do them, so we don’t have a good point of reference for creating more order in our lives.

This is why I suggest that people start small and try to bring order to just one tiny aspect of their lives. After that, they can do more to organize their lives and they can do it with the added inspiration that comes from seeing the results of their first efforts at organization. Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about.

Several women in my family have told me that they can’t decide what to wear in the mornings when they are getting ready for work. So they procrastinate and lose a lot of time by having no order to their mornings or their closets. But imagine what would happen if one of these women were to start hanging up her clothes immediately after getting home from work and start ironing the clothes that needed to be ironed so those clothes would be ready to wear the next time she wanted to wear them.

One tiny change can alter the whole landscape of your life. So perhaps you need some better habits of organization. And perhaps you need a little help from Make That, Break That so you can learn how to create new habits.

Purpose

I am a firm believer that the biggest problem in the Western world today is a lack of individual purpose. Without purpose, people wander aimlessly through life, wasting their time and resources. They waste their talents, they waste their opportunities, and they allow the shifting winds of popular opinion to direct them down paths in life that have nothing to do with their God-given destiny.

A vision for one’s life is the greatest thing a person can possess. With a purpose and driving motivation, a person can do just about anything his heart desires. Without a defined purpose, a person is bound to fall into all the deadly pits that lie along life’s way. People without a vision are more susceptible to addiction. People without a vision are more susceptible to instability. And people with no vision for their lives are more susceptible to all the bad habits that affect the health and relationships, the earning power and productivity of men and women everywhere who wonder why they were even born.

But when a person has a firm grasp on the reason for which he was created, that person will naturally develop the habits that he needs to fulfill his purpose in life. He (or she) will eat the right kinds of food, save the right amount of money, sleep the appropriate number of hours each night, and associate with the right kind of people to do the things that motivate him. He also will avoid those temptations that are designed to lure him away from his chosen path and to entrap him in a lifestyle that is destructive and unfulfilling.

So search your heart and know why you exist. The habits you form today will be determined by the path you choose in life, and the path you walk in life will be determined by the habits you form today.

Don't Settle for the Parade

I am convinced the biggest hurdle in life is in our mind. I’m not saying that we don’t all have other obstacles and/or challenges in our everyday life. I am saying that we must shift our mindset, grow our mindset, and develop our mindset, if we want to change our future. If we want to grow, if we want to move past the obstacles that have hindered us from reaching success in the past, if we want to change the trajectory of our life, we must learn to think differently.

Let me explain. I’m reminded of a story of a little boy named Tommy. Tommy was so excited when he learned the circus was coming to town. He loved the idea of the circus. It was just after WW II and he was an only child of parents who did not have anything to spare. Because of Tommy’s excitement, Tommy’s parents decided to stretch finances and scrape money together so he could go to see the circus.

Finally, the day came. Tommy got all of his chores done early and cleaned up to get ready to go. He planned to see all the circus offered - the ringmaster, performers, clowns, and animals - everything he had been dreaming of. As was tradition, the circus paraded through town on that first day and Tommy made sure he got there in time to line up near the edge of the parade route and watch as they walked by. Initially, he realized he could hear the band and then, to his great joy, he saw them coming - the ringmaster and elephants, the acrobats and lions. He had never experienced anything like it and certainly could not have imagined the grandeur and energy he was witnessing as the parade passed by.

At last, the parade finale approached with the troupe of clowns bringing the parade to a close. The clowns were the best part of the procession yet. As they brought up the rear of the circus parade, Tommy did something no one could have predicted. He walked up to one of the clowns and gave the clown his precious admission for the circus and went home. Tommy started out with a thrilling vision of what he thought would be the greatest day of his young life, but he settled for something far less.

What is the point people are missing? People miss the point when they have no purpose, no clear vision. They are being tossed by the waves of circumstances and situations they find themselves in. Sometimes good things happen and sometimes bad things happen. They make their way through life the same as millions of others so that, when they compare themselves to others, they can honestly say, “My life isn’t so bad; I’ve done OK.”

I have a different view. Tommy’s vision fell short. If he really wanted to see the circus in its fullness, he needed to buy a ticket and sit through the show. The show was planned well so that there would be surprise, amazing feats, thrills, and a high point he would remember for the rest of his life. But because his vision was not explored and developed, he really was content to only see the people and animals of the circus simply tumble, dance and walk past him in a parade.

Have there been times in your life when you were content with just the crumbs from the table, or the parade without the show? Our vision needs to be clear. It needs to birth passion and promote drive within us. It needs to call upon all of our talents and abilities to be achieved. If our vision is not driving us in this way, I don’t think it is true vision. We need to actively pursue those dreams that reside in us and we should never settle for less than those dreams. We need to find information, counsel, and mentors who can help us expand the imagination of our heart. Be transparent with those who can speak into your life. Invest time reading and listening to those who have gone before you. Try and fail and then try again. Investigate and stretch. The resulting dream could be right at the end of the parade and the beginning of a thrilling success.

What Is Real?

As you contemplate the habits you would like to form in your life and as you use the information in Make That, Break That to help you do it, I want you to pay close attention to the habits you choose to nurture. It takes time to develop a new habit and to make that habit a permanent and subconscious fixture in your behavior. For that reason, you should choose your habits wisely, because the habits you choose to form will reveal your true priorities in life.

Some people will want to develop habits designed to preserve their health. Others will develop habits that can advance their careers. Some will seek to nurture habits of financial advancement. And still others will form habits that can make their lives more organized and a little easier to manage. But when all is said and done, there are really only three things that matter in this life. As you grow older and as you begin to focus more intently on those things that matter most, you will begin to focus more on your relationship with God, your relationships with the people you love, and your relationship with the destiny God has given you to fulfill.

As the end of your life grows closer, you won’t care about the size of your house or all the “Employee of the Year” plaques that hang on your wall. You will only care about the things that matter most, because these are the “real” things in life, the things that will endure beyond your lifetime and truly count when you stand before God.

So as you consider the habits you would like to develop in your life, think on these things, because these are the things that really count. These are the things that can bring you true joy in this life and significance throughout eternity.