Your life is governed by habits. They are essentially deep grooves in the brain which offer you security and familiarity. In many ways they are a good thing. In others, they can be at best a comfort zone that means you never fulfil your potential, and at worst the destruction of everything you hold dear.

It is possible to break out of these grooves, but like a needle in an old record, it’s difficult. The best thing is to replace them with a different or similar habit. Nicotine gum and smoking is an example. Cold calling and networking is a more extreme example.

Habits can be good or bad. If you think you don’t have them, can you answer the following?

Why do you have the same rituals every morning?
Why do you eat at the same restaurants?
Why do you hang about with the same friends?
Why do you wear 20% of your wardrobe 80% of the time?
Why do you do the same things and hope for a different result?

According to trend guru Seth Godin, making a habit is a lot easier than breaking one (ask a smoker) and habits often come in surprising ways (like if you buy bottled water, or drive home a certain way each time).

The application for your development and performance is that if you want to grow, you're going to have to adopt new habits, or modify and even eradicate some of your old ones. New and better results do not usually come from old and trusted habits. If you tend to do the same thing, you tend to get more of the same.

The flipside of this is your clients and prospects. They’ve got habits too. Just like you, their life and their behaviours are made up of thousands of daily and weekly rituals and routines, from which side of the bed they sleep on to what they wash first in the shower.

If you want to evoke a different or better response in them to your marketing message, they’ll need to break out. If you want them to be more receptive to your presence and your offers of help, you’ll need to induce different behaviours.

There is a murky grey area along the habit continuum. When does useful become stagnant? When does active become complacent? A classic example of habit I come across in my work is when I deliver my TRIP System^® Masterclasses to clients. This is the reason I very rarely do one-off programmes, because I know that people simply will not change with 'sheep dip' approaches.

Instead, I know a more hands-on approach with background reading and preparation articles helps to prepare you for the mesage. Then there's the face-to-face delivery, which is impactful, interesting and immediately applicable, but still only represents 50% of your success. Finally, there's the ongoing programme of education, coaching, emails, educational materials and dedicated webpage. That's what starts to break and make habits!

It’s human nature to want to take the easy way out, and habits let you do that because you don’t have to think about them. Thinking is hard! But they can be broken and changed for several reasons:

• Restlessness. When you begin feeling uneasy, agitated, on edge and uncomfortable, you’ll think about doing something different. Your sensitivity to this feeling will determine the extent of your action.
• Desperation. You become dissatisfied with the status quo. You get to that ‘I’ve had enough’ point. While you continue to look in your mirror and say, ‘I still look pretty good’, you’ll never do anything about your weight. When enough is enough, you’ll be motivated to take action.
• Coincidence. One day you walk into a new restaurant, and it becomes your new favourite. You hear a new song and forget about your old favourite. You meet somebody new in a chance encounter and you begin looking at the world in a different way. Not always scientific, but very much part of the human psyche.
• Shock. Something very brutal, frightening or disturbing can make you change the way you do things, and influence whether you do things at all. Severe trauma like bereavement, career and house moves, stress, mental overload, relationship pressures and even seemingly pleasurable things like holidays can bring about major changes in behaviour.
• External Stimuli. Being incentivised to change by your boss or your financial situation are examples of outside forces coming to bear on your internal processes. The incentive may be negative (often inducing pain motivation, which is action that takes you AWAY from something) or positive (pleasure motivation, which moves you TOWARDS something).

What you get used to can trap you, and holds you back from being everything you could be. Of course, knowing when something needs changing is the tricky point. The starting point is wanting to change. Then it involves some kind of question like:

If I do this, what will be the positive value or benefit?

If you're doing something because someone else wants you to do it, you can see that your incentive to change is going to be low. See the benefits and see the change!