Limiting Habits Impact our Productivity & Performance, Creativity & Innovation. What to Do about It?

A human being is only a sum total of her habits - emotional, physical, mental and spiritual. If you want to 10X your life, 10X the velocity with which to transform your Limiting Habits to Growth Habits.

Here are a few habits to consider - 
a. Physical - Coffee vs water, alcohol vs fresh juice, sleeping extra vs early morning yoga, sleeping extra on weekends vs playing sports.
b. Emotional -  Social media vs face-to-face catching-up with people and deeply connecting, emotionally blocked vs journaling to authentically and with vulnerability experiencing your emotions, arguing with your spouse at home vs deciding the winner in a sport playing outside.
c. Mental - Watching TV vs reading a book, only working vs working and also investing in learning a new non-work related skill year on year.
d. Spiritual - Busy being busy vs self-observation through meditation.

The loss of energy as we age, disease (dis-ease: body not at ease), stress, pain & aches are all a function of limiting habits; which unfortunately have a negative impact on our productivity & performance, creativity & innovation. 

If you are clear you want to create deeply fulfilling, super success this lifetime; not working on your habits is like having a pebble in your shoe as you race to win in the Olympics of Life. 

There are 4 stages in transforming a limiting habit into a growth habit:

1. Unconscious Incompetence: You have a habit that is dragging you down but you are not even conscious of it. Working with a coach works well to support you to become conscious of your limiting habits. Your spouse can also rattle the entire list, probably pretty accurately, but spouses are not trained in the art and science of coaching. So, better to have an objective, neutral, trained party to work with. Any good coach will support you to transcend your limiting habits and graduate into growth habits because without this foundational work, no other coaching objective can authentically be fulfilled. 

2. Conscious Incompetence: This is the most uncomforatble stage to be in; but the fact is without coming here, you can't progress further. In this stage, you are painfully and consciously aware of your limiting habits. You can see yourself drinking coffee, not waking up to do yoga and all the other limiting habits but you are able to do nothing about it. Most people, at this stage, begin to beat themselves up which further reduces their power to transcend limiting habits. What you need to do here is to acknowledge your inability to make a different choice and celebrate because you moved from Stage 1 to Stage 2; which is a progress. The second thing to do at this stage is to track every time you made the default automatic choice. What you track, you can transform. You are a Starter at this stage and will give in atleast 90% of the time to the default limiting habit.

3. Conscious Competence: At this stage, you are making an effort to consciously choose the Growth Habit over the Limiting Habit. You lose most times in the beginning, you win some times. Keep tracking during the day, and reviewing & reflecting on your progress at the end of the day. Here's what all you should be tracking to identify the trigger of the limiting habit - Date, Time, Emotional State, Physical State, Mental State, Location, People Around, Loss / Won. Track before you give in. At the end of this phase, you become a Champion and will give in at maximum 10% of the time to the default limiting habit.

4. Unconscious Competence: At this stage, the limiting habit no longer has a hold on you. You have 100% hit rate, no longer need to track and the growth habit is yours to keep. You no longer need to make a conscious decision to choose between limiting and growth habit. The choice of the growth habit has become an automatic default response mode and the processing has shifted from your Conscious Mind into your Subconscious Mind. You are a Master now of this one habit that you started your journey with. 

​Yes, it is a slow journey. There is no quick fix for this. Follow this path to Personal Mastery and you will find productivity & performance, innovation & creativity in every area of your wheel of life. Wishing you deeply fulfilling, super success.

Love, Jyoti.