9 tips on how to change your habits in your personal or professional life
In this article on how to change your habits, you will discover useful tips that will help you improve the quality of your personal and professional life.
Some people want to improve their nutrition, others want to improve the quality of their sleep, and still, others need to free themselves from the gaze of others or to overcome their shyness.
More generally, people on a personal development journey must improve one or more aspects of their lives.
If you are looking for effective ways to improve the quality of your life in a reasonable amount of time, check out some of the tips I have learned from my experience and practice as a life coach.
1 – Identify your main motivation
Why do you want to change a habit?
Is it a time of professional or personal challenge that motivates you to change?
If you want to change your life for the better, you need to understand what motivates you to change.
If this motivation is strong enough, you will have a greater chance of making this change in your life.
If not, everything will become more complicated.
However, don’t settle for the first motivation that comes to your mind.
My coaching practice has shown me that the first motivation is not the most important one.
It is not the one that will help you face the inevitable challenges you will experience in the pursuit of greater personal or professional accomplishment.
If possible, be curious and ask yourself this question.
Is this motivation I just found strong enough to allow me to handle the difficult moments?
If the answer is yes, you are on the right track.
If not, keep asking yourself.
If you want to be supported in this process, the customized support offered by a life coach will help you identify your strongest motivation to make this major personal or professional change.
To go further on the topic of motivation, I suggest you read my article on how to increase your motivation.
2 – Experience the change in advance
Have you ever achieved a goal without feeling a real sense of satisfaction?
If you’ve ever had that experience, you know what it feels like during those moments.
That’s why now before you decide to change one of your habits and invest your time and energy in this new goal, it is important to test this change before it materializes in your life.
Feel this change before it happens in your life for a few minutes each day in order to understand if this goal is really worth pursuing.
But this exercise is not exclusively useful for that.
Choosing to test this change in advance is also a great way to boost your motivation.
When you imagine in more and more detail the effects that your new goal will have in your life and in the lives of others, you will have even more reason to continue doing your best.
This will help you build resilience and maximize your chances of achieving your goal.
You may also decide not to pursue a goal that could create negative changes in your professional or personal life.
So, it is safe to say that experiencing a change before it becomes a reality is an excellent way to strengthen your self-awareness and expand the understanding of your needs.
Finally, experiencing the change in advance is important to perceive the blind spots, the aspects of your change that you may not be able to notice right away.
In summary, experiencing a change before it becomes reality is a strategy that has multiple benefits.
3 – Create behavioral alternatives
Having good motivation is important, but motivation is a bit like self-esteem, it constantly varies depending on the context, our choices, and how we interpret what happens to us every day.
Repeating the desired behavior is an effective strategy for creating and maintaining a new habit, but how do you deal with fluctuations in your motivation?
The answer is simple, you can create behavioral alternatives in advance.
If you need and want to change an aspect of your life, it is because your behavioral repertoire is inflexible or ineffective.
To implement new behaviors more easily, you can create them in advance.
This is very helpful because it gives you new options that were not previously available.
The cognitive-behavioral approach provides us with two very effective tools to facilitate change.
These are implementation intentions and mental contrast.
Implementation intentions are statements of the type if…then.
For example, if this situation occurs then I will act in this new way.
Ideally, I recommend that you prepare at least two behavioral alternatives for each type of change.
The mental contrast is to prepare a list of all the things that might make it difficult for you to perform your new behavior and to prepare at least one solution for each obstacle in advance.
By combining the effectiveness of implementation intentions and mental contrasting you will increase your chances of successfully implementing this change.
4 – Improve the way you manage your emotions
Changing your behavior is not always easy and the road to the new version of yourself is full of good and bad surprises.
We are not only rational beings and we have emotions that are sometimes difficult to manage.
Emotion management is a very broad topic and if you wish to develop your knowledge of this aspect of your personal development, I suggest you read my article on emotion management.
But when it comes to managing change, it is important that you make time to experience both pleasant and less pleasant emotions.
If you deny emotions they will become stronger and they will put your well-being and health at risk.
But if you focus too long on the unpleasant emotions, you will tend to procrastinate and reduce your chances of taking action and achieving your goal.
If you have a tendency to procrastinate, I recommend that you read my article on how to fight procrastination.
In summary, give yourself time to perceive and understand your emotions but then focus on positive emotions because they will help you take action to create the new life you want.
5 – Be patient
You will be able to better handle your change by giving yourself the time you need to make progress.
If you set a realistic goal in a reasonable amount of time, you will be able to create a life you enjoy more easily.
But if you are too much of a perfectionist or too rushed and therefore stressed, your growth will be reduced or jeopardized.
Focus on the small steps and don’t minimize them.
Becoming aware of your progress is a great way to build confidence.
Remember that your new future is built day by day.
Every day is different and it’s a new beginning.
Remember that there is no such thing as failure as long as you decide to take advantage of each new experience to move forward.
When your actions don’t bring you the desired results, stay positive and take another step forward by testing a different approach.
If you feel like you are not moving forward, I suggest you read my article in which I explain how to bounce back from a failure.
6 – Identify the need behind your unproductive habit
Every behavior, even the most negative, is motivated by a need and this need is often very important.
Trying to change a habit without understanding the need that the person is trying to satisfy can produce self-sabotaging strategies.
These are behaviors that will hinder or prevent the evolution of a person.
Be curious and do not judge yourself.
Observe your behavior without judgment by recognizing what influences the occurrence of your habit.
After identifying the situations that trigger your behavior, find the related need and the alternative but more productive behaviors that enable you to satisfy the same need.
Again, be patient and you will see that, over time, you will be able to implement sustainable changes.
7 – Change more than one habit at a time
You’ve probably read the opposite advice in other articles on the internet, that it’s better to change only one habit at a time.
This is because it would be too difficult to change multiple habits at once.
In reality, this is just a limiting belief, a deeply rooted idea that a person has limited abilities.
Fortunately, this is not true and it is just a way of thinking linked to a scarcity mentality.
But the opposite is true!
It is easier to change more than one habit at a time because you take advantage of your high motivational state which drives you to change an initial habit and allows you to reinforce your discipline.
Also, by combining this with new behavioral alternatives, you start to get more results and these results will multiply if you try to change more than one habit at a time.
Your motivation will continue to grow and you will be able to change many habits that may have been established for years in a few months.
8 – Create an action plan
Now that you have identified your main motivation for change, started to experience that change in advance and have all the other strategies I have just outlined in this article, it is time for you to prepare an action plan.
This involves planning in your agenda:
- the actions you will take at specific times
- the resources you need to carry out your change(s)
- the potential obstacles to change.
- the behavioral alternatives
- the possible solutions to manage each situation
With this structure in place, you will be able to move forward with your personal or professional life plan.
Try not to plan too many or too few actions.
Move at your own pace and keep progressing.
When you encounter a challenge, don’t give up but instead focus on the solution to the problem.
Each time you meet your commitments, celebrate your success.
Do your best and remember that every action counts to get you closer to your goal.
9 – Use the power of positive internal dialogue
We all have an internal dialogue that influences how we perceive events and the actions we decide to take or avoid.
This dialogue can be positive or negative.
If it is positive and supportive, it helps you to progress and move forward despite the difficulties you encounter in your life.
If it is negative, it can prevent you from creating a better quality of life and negatively impact your well-being as well as your mental and physical health.
Think of positive internal dialogue as a fellow traveler who is there to support you in times of difficulty and to celebrate your victories with you.
On the contrary, the internal dialogue is like a person who keeps criticizing you, noticing what’s wrong, and generally being rather pessimistic.
You are free to choose the type of friend who will be with you in your personal or professional evolution.
This is why it is better to choose a positive internal dialogue.
To go further on this topic, I suggest you read my article on internal dialogue.
Conclusion on how to change your life habits
In this article, I provided you with 9 tips on how to change your life habits.
To take advantage of the expertise of a coach, write to us using our contact form, call us at +33 6 69 46 03 79 or contact us on WhatsApp at +33 6 69 46 03 79.
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Français : Comment changer ses habitudes de vie une fois pour toutes