The Fastest Way To Get Results & Move Forward

Being a physical therapist and someone who coaches people on mindset; coaching people to have a positive, proactive mindset, I meet people every day that have pain, whether it’s physical pain or psychological pain, and they’re having trouble getting results in their life.  Now, today, I’m going to discuss the fastest way to get results and move forward.

Now the other day I was listening to a podcast. It was the Ziglar podcast and the host was talking to Tom Ziglar. Who’s the son of the legendary Zig Ziglar, who was a motivational coach and business coach. And Tom Ziglar has continued his legacy and he asked Tom Ziglar. He asked, what’s the fastest way to success. And without hesitating,

Tom Ziglar said…

“The Fastest Way To Success,

Is Replacing Bad Habits With Good Habits”

Now he went on to say is…

Anyone can want change,

but only few have the ability to make it happen.

So now how do you make it happen?

How do you replace good habits with bad habits?

Now, habits can be a challenge for a lot of us. It seems pretty darn easy to create the bad habits and difficult to create the positive ones. Right? It just seems that way though.

So I’m going to start by using a variation of what I call my Plus/Minus Exercise.

Now, the Plus/Minus Exercise is first identifying your negative habits or the minus habits, things that are taking away from the positive results that you could be getting in your life.

So what I want you to do is I want you to look at three habits that you have that are negative habits, that are probably not creating the best scenario for you getting results.

Let’s start with ones that a lot of people have. Let’s say one is watching too much television, or I’m not eating right. Or I speak negatively to myself all the time or another bad habit is I’m not exercising at all.

Let’s look at the first negative habit possibly. It’s watching too much TV after dinner. You sit down on the couch and you watch your favorite Netflix series, and you promise yourself, you would just watch one.

But you know, those Netflix series, there are geared to just automatically start the next one. And you watch three or four of the shows. And before you know it, it’s midnight and you’ve fallen asleep on the couch and you’d drive yourself upstairs. And you now realize you’re only going to get five hours sleep and you wake yourself up and you have a tendency to do that almost every night.

And you can see how this is a little bit of wasted time. Now you do get the enjoyment of the show and that’s positive entertainment. That’s great, but you may want to limit that to say one show per night, let’s say three nights a week or four nights a week, as opposed to doing it every night for three hours.

So now the plus part of the plus minus exercise is you can reduce or eliminate the negative habit and replace it with a positive habit.

So now what would we do with the negative habit of TV watching? So let’s say we reduce it down to one episode of your favorite Netflix series three to four times a week, instead of three hours, you would replace that with a positive habit. Let’s say reading a book and information on book, a philosophical book, one of your favorite novels. 

You could spend some of that time planning your next day or planning the week. That way you’re more organized for the rest of your week. And in the additional time that you have, you can go to bed on time, let’s say at 10 o’clock or 10 30, so that you got seven to eight hours of sleep a night. And so that’s reducing a negative habit and increasing a positive habit. And therefore the net result is growth in your life, reducing a habit or replacing a negative habit with a positive habit.

Let’s look at another example, let’s say the negative habit is poor eating habits. Let’s say you wake up every morning and have a coffee and a doughnut for breakfast. So that’s the negative habit. And if you’re doing that five to six times a week, those calories add up over the year, and that could be the excess of weight gain that you’re complaining of.

So let’s reduce that or eliminate that negative, bad habit in the morning. And that’s replaced that with a positive habit. So what’s the positive habit that we could replace that with. You could do a couple of things. You could make sure that you have a healthy breakfast every morning, whether it’s oatmeal, whether it’s, um, fruit, whether it’s possibly intermittent fasting and you skip breakfast and you don’t eat into say 12, 14 hours until lunch. If that’s the proper healthy thing for you to do with any other medical conditions that you have.

So that’s a great, another example of reducing or eliminating a bad habit and improving or increasing a positive habit. And then the net result in your life is growth and progress towards your goals.

You see, at the end of the day, our improvement or the degree of which we grow and progress in our life is the degree to which we can reduce our negative habits and improve our positive habits.

And in there lies the challenge and the struggle, right?

And I couldn’t talk about habits unless I talked about what I call the mindset loop, because really habits are a result of our actions, right? And actions are a result of our beliefs and thoughts about ourselves.

So if we have negative beliefs and thoughts about ourselves and negative thoughts that leads into negative actions and negative actions done repetitively gives us negative habits and negative habits gives us what negative results.

So we want to turn that around so that we have positive beliefs and thoughts about ourselves. The positive thoughts lead into positive actions, the positive actions develop into positive habits. And guess what, positive habits gives us, what, positive results.

And then as part of the positive mindset loop between beliefs and thoughts and positive actions, we have the area where we can set goals. Set specific goals for what we want for ourselves. And if we set specific goals for what we want and then positive goals, guess what that’s going to lead to positive actions. And then we’re going to lead to positive habits. And if we set those goals for ourselves, we’re going to start to plan out the negative habits that we have to decrease and the positive habits that we have to increase so that the net result of our habits over time is positive growth, positive growth towards our goals.

So again, the fastest way to get results in our life is to replace negative habits with positive habits. But that starts with having a positive mindset, which will lead to positive actions. And if we set specific goals for ourselves that are positive, that will lead us to the actions that will help us reduce our negative habits and improve our positive habits. And the net result of that will be positive growth in our life and help us progress towards our goals.

Be Positive, Be Motivated, Be Focused and Be Well,

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