Christo: Hi there! Today I wanted to share a tip around habits. So we get a lot of questions, people asking how do you focus? How do you keep your focus on business? How do you keep motivated in business? Sometimes people come up with things like look I just don‘t have time or I‘m wasting time doing things and I‘ve thought about habits in general. The ways to either create good habits or break bad habits. Now, obviously, a habit is just repetitively doing something. So a lot of times when it comes to business, people might have bad habits where they might be just wasting time or they could be extreme bad habits like someone might say it‘s like drinking or smoking or something like that.

A good exercise to do from today‘s tip that I want to share with you is you can think about whatever it is that might be a bad habit. It might just be that you might feel like you talk too much or it might be just like you‘re wasting time or stuffing around on social media. A good idea of something to do to create the awareness of what we actually get from these habits because.. or what we get from it and then what it costs us because everything we do, if we do it, we‘re getting something out of it. Whether we like it or not. So let‘s say the habit was spending too much time on Facebook. What you could do as an exercise is create a list of everything you get out of spending time on Facebook. It might be the satisfaction of just getting to procrastinate from doing other work. It might be the satisfaction that you just get to sit on your butt for a while. It might be the satisfaction that you get from getting to stickybeak from other people and see what everyone‘s up to.

What we then do is to create a list of everything that you could possibly get out of that, no matter what it is. Even if it‘s just whatever the bad habit it is. You create a list of all these things that you get out of it because you are getting something from it. Positive, even if it‘s some negative, apparently negative habit. Then next to all those positive things, create a list of bad things, things to counter the positive. Like, okay, I get to procrastinate on work so I don‘t have to face this annoying tasks. Well, obviously, the counter to that might be, for example, lost productivity, lost time, not as high sales figure as you‘d like, not as much revenue, not as much marketing, not as productive in the day. You get the idea. I get to stickybeak, yes, so what? Maybe I don‘t have to know what everyone else is up to.

So we basically just create this list of all the things we get from that habit and then we flip those over and basically keep putting negative next to the positive to counter those things. It‘s a great exercise to do in just about anything you feel like you don‘t really enjoy doing or something that you don‘t want to do anymore of in your life. If it‘s something, on the other hand, what you might do, is you might find you‘re getting all these positives out of it. If you feel like, actually I want to keep that habit even though it‘s a seemingly bad habit, or something that other people say is a bad habit, if you‘re feeling bad about it not because you‘re trying to force someone else‘s value on to yourself to live your life with better values. However, usually, what you‘ll find is it‘s something that could be done away with, or spend less time on Facebook, it‘s a great way for you to see that, no matter what the habit is.