I’m a man of routine.
It’s a consequence of being a highly disciplined person. Someone operating at a disciplined level of awareness gives themselves a command and follows it time and time again.
The danger of being highly disciplined (and there’s always another side to everything) is you can become too regimented, too rigid, and unwilling to mix it up a little. That can be limiting. Making a habit of activities that bring greater success in your life is obviously a recipe for ever improving results, just as making a habit of activities that detract from success achieves the very opposite.
Far too many people can confirm that truth.
Take my fitness routine for example.
Every week, on Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday and Thursdays, I leave the house at 5.25am and ride up to hour-long personal training sessions (aside from Sunday when I take a trip around the full span of the Malverns to complete a 32km ride).
This well-ingrained habit serves me very well, but I’d benefit more and challenge the body far more effectively, by switching it up a little.
So for example, this Thursday morning, despite the glorious cold spell we’re enjoying at the moment, I’ll take the car for a change and opt to do a 30-minute speed circuit on the treadmill. Saturday, I might take the car again and use the stair-climber.
We human beings are creatures of habit. The trouble is, if we’re not getting the results we want, we rarely look where we need to look if matters are to improve. We’re either completely oblivious to our habitual ways of thinking and acting (ignorance), or we’re just not willing to go there (willful ignorance).
The bottom line is, if you’re hungry for better results in any aspect of your life, identify the habits causing your existing results and modify them accordingly.
So simple to write, so difficult, for many people, to grasp and live into.
We’re coming up to “silly” season. “Silly” season is one of typically two short periods in a year where some people – not all by any stretch of the imagination – start to consider the bigger picture of their lives, beyond the day-to-day grind. They make great vows of improvement, to take control of their lives…and invariably do neither. The same routine transpires year-on-year.
Life doesn’t bend to great vows of improvement. Life only bends to great vows of improvement when they’re put into motion and acted upon in a consistent manner.
Life’s never been shy in dishing up a plethora of opportunities to grow. We’ve all had them. So why do we, in such large numbers, continue to pass them up, to do what we’ve always done, when we know it can only bring more of what we already have?
Time thunders by. The end of another year is staring us in the face – and we only get so many. None of us are handed a contract to live for 300 years, yet many treat each passing year like there’s an endless supply.
2018 is knocking at your door. It’s asking the same questions its predecessor asked, and the predecessor before it: Who do you choose to be? What will you do with this gift of another year of life? What do you choose to call forth into your experience in the year ahead?
Is it to be business as usual, the same old, same old? Or is it to be different, better, more lucrative, fulfilling and rewarding?
Only you can make that call – and you can’t avoid making it.
If you intend to live for the next year and beyond it, you’ll be spending a year’s worth of life in the next 12 months regardless. In that you have NO choice.
Where you DO have choice is what you do with the time. You only get to make it once though. You’ll never get it back to choose again.
Christian Simpson is the UK’s leading coach and mentor to business owners and entrepreneurs. For COMPLIMENTARY ACCESS to tried, tested and proven entrepreneurial success strategies, click here
