According to Forbes, most people lack a clear strategy to replace old habits with new ones. In order to adopt a new habit, you have to unlearn an old one and replace it with new behavior. So how do you do that? Here are 3 ways to make new habits stick.
1. Have a Plan – start with working on small baby steps to practice the new habit on people who already know you and trust you. It could be with your family, trusted friend or co-worker.
2. Be consistent – In his best-selling book, Outliers: The Story of Success, author Malcom Gladwell describes the 10,000 rule, the notion that it takes 10,000 hours of practice (and a decent amount of talent) for most people to get good at anything. If you want to develop a new habit, you have to develop a pattern on more than infrequent basis. You must role-play or Improve at least one hour per week.
3. Practice Patience – patience is important if you want to see results from new behavior. Under stress, it’s not uncommon for people to revert back to their old ways. That is, until they get to the point where the new behavior is so comfortable it seems natural. But the mistake many business owners and sales managers or educators make is to expect new skills to be integrated and used 100% of the time, immediately. If they have someone who’s always done thing the old way, and we teach them a new approach, don’t be surprised if it takes a few weeks or months to break old habits and adopt new ones. Patience is a virtue, in life and in business.
