Change is easier said than done.
Success in life is really about change. In order to get from where you are to where you want to be, you must change.
But, change is a process. From my Rich Habits research, specifically my research on self-made millionaires, I’ve identified seven steps that are part of this change process:
Step #1 Clarity Opens Your Eyes For the Need to Change
Very few people have a clear vision of their life. Most are like leaves on a fall day, floating around, waiting for a breeze to take them somewhere, anywhere. Wealthy, successful people do not wait for breezes to come along. They create their own breezes through the process of clarity of vision.
When you are absolutely clear about the life you want, the car you want to drive, the house you want to live in, the ideal career you’d like to have, the money you desire to make, you turn on certain parts of the brain that then go to work, behind the scenes, trying to transform that vision into reality.
When you are uncertain about your life’s path, you lack clarity. When you lack clarity, you can very easily find yourself on someone else’s path, pursuing their dreams, their goals and their ideas of a meaningful life.
Step #2 Self-Awareness is a Rich Habit Superpower
The fact is, most people lack self-awareness. They are completely unaware of what is going on internally (their thoughts, emotions and habits) or externally (their environment).
There are even videos of people completely unaware of their external environment. Here’s one I like called the bear on the porch.
Self-awareness, however, is a real superpower for the few who possess it.
Self-awareness allows you to recognize your own thoughts, emotions and behaviors. It allows you to see what is going on all around you in your environment. Self-awareness enables you to pivot in order to avoid obstacles, pitfalls, mistakes and toxic people who get in the way of your success.
Self-made millionaires make a daily habit of developing this self-awareness superpower Rich Habit. And it’s one of the reasons they become self-made millionaires.
Self-awareness helps you do many things:
- Self-awareness enables you to see your strengths and weaknesses. This helps you to focus on what you are good at and find others who are happy to do what you are bad at.
- Self-awareness enables you to identify your good and bad habits. This helps you to identify habits that help you succeed and eliminate habits that get in the way of success.
- Self-awareness enables you to identify toxic people. This helps you to avoid being used, abused or dragged into others troubled lives. Toxic people are like potholes along your path to success. They make the journey bumpy and difficult.
- Self-awareness enables you to see dangers, obstacles and pitfalls that are oblivious to others. This saves you time, money and emotional anguish.
- Self-awareness enables you to identify the lessons found in mistakes. This helps you grow and improve.
- Self-awareness enables you to step into the shoes of others and see what they see. This helps you empathize with others. This also helps you when you are negotiating with others.
Self-awareness is a Superpower Rich Habit that is critical to success. Without it, change is impossible and without change, success is impossible.
Step #3 You Must Desire Change
Will you do what needs to be done in order to become the person you desire to be? This is a stop sign for most people. The desire to change needs to be strong enough before you are able to move on to the next step.
There are two catalysts that help boost your desire for change:
- Surrounding Yourself With People You Admire – When you surround yourself with people you admire and respect, they will influence your thinking and your habits. You will desire to become more like the people you admire. That’s one of the Rich Habits I uncovered in my five-year Rich Habits Study.
- Disgust – Disgust is a feeling that you’ve reached a dead end in your life. You feel as if your back is up against a wall. Disgust forces you to self-assess. This self-assessment often leads to massive changes in your life.
Step #4 Taking Action Forces Change
The two biggest enemies of success are fear and doubt. They hold most back from taking action. The interesting thing about fear and doubt, however, is that they never go away, no matter how successful you become.
So, if fear and doubt exist for the successful, why don’t they hold them back from taking action?
The problem isn’t fear and doubt. The problem is habit. Successful people simply make a habit of taking action, despite the fear and doubt. They habitualize action.
Only by taking action do you gain the experiences of facing and overcoming obstacles, facing mistakes and learning from them, taking risks and surviving failure.
Through action, you gain life experiences that become a reservoir you can reach into during a time of need.
When you face obstacles, that mental reservoir in your mind says, we’ve faced a similar obstacle before a few years ago and this is the way around it.
When you face an uncertainty, that mental reservoir in your mind says, we’ve faced a similar uncertainty before and this was the mistake we made and need to avoid.
When you face a risk, that mental reservoir in your mind says, we’ve taken a similar risk before and we survived.
Courage grows through action because actions create a mental reservoir of historical experiences which gives you the courage to overcome your fears and take action.
Step #5 Track Set-Backs and Progress
The things we measure, we can change. The wealthy, successful people I studied were fanatics about tracking, measuring and monitoring their progress in many aspects of their lives
Because change is a trial and error process, the actions you take may or may not move you forward in life. But how will you know if you are moving forwards or backwards, if you don’t track your progress? Tracking helps you identify what works and what does not work. It helps highlight mistakes and processes that work.
Also, tracking, especially on a daily basis, acts like an accountability partner. If forces you to confront whatever action you were supposed to take.
Step # 6 Mistakes Force You to Pivot
The self-made millionaires in my study took their mistakes very seriously. They went to great lengths to figure out what they did wrong. Through this arduous mistake analysis process, they gained knowledge from their mistakes. With this new knowledge, they pivoted and went back at it.
Pivoting involves experimenting with different activities until you stumble upon an activity that, thanks to tracking, separates what works from what doesn’t work. You’ll know what works because you’ll experience little blips of success. Those blips of success are life’s way of telling you that you are on the right track and to keep doing what you’re doing.
Step # 7 Turn What Works Into Habits
The self-made millionaires in my study forged into habits, processes that, through experimentation, were proven to work. These daily habits put them on autopilot for success.
But, habits take time. Depending on the complexity of the habit, it can take anywhere from a few days to eight months before a behavior becomes a habit.
About Thomas C. Corley
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