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3 Habits to Achieve Your Greatest Goals

Written by: Michael O'Grady

Article Overview: It's impossible for me to talk about how to achieve your goals without talking about habits. Stephen Covey teaches us that habits are the overlapping of knowledge, skill and attitude. Creating good habits will help you manage your time and yourself more productively. In this article, I tell you what you must do before you can work new habits into your life. I also highlight 3 of Covey's most effective habits that will get you closer to your greatest personal and professional goals.

3 Habits to Achieve Your Greatest Goals

I'm a goal-oriented person. I enjoy teaching others how to go after their greatest personal and professional goals. I find that it's impossible to talk about how to achieve your goals without talking about habits. Stephen Covey, Author of "7 Habits of Highly Effective People" teaches us that habits are the overlapping of knowledge, skill and attitude. Creating good habits will help you manage your time and yourself more productively.

Before you can work new habits into your life, I believe you must first experience a mental paradigm shift. You need to experience an event so powerfully motivating to you, that your beliefs, thoughts, ideals and behaviors are changed for good. In other words, your motivation must be so strong, that you want to create new thoughts and behaviors into your daily routines.

You might accomplish this naturally through different life-altering events or you might experience this change at a seminar, workshop, or through a motivational resource. However you acheive this mental shift is fine, but the end result must be a strong motivation for change.

Here are 3 of Covey's habits which I believe will effectively get your closer to your greatest goals:

Be Proactive - A proactive person's behavior stems from thoughts and values. A reactive person's behavior stems from conditions and emotions. Creating a habit of being proactive will help you handle obstacles and challenges by thinking them through. By being proactive, you will also take more actions that are directly related to your values and the principles that define who you are.

People who are reactive don't think their actions through enough. They also make decisions and take actions based on impulses and "feelings of the moment". This can result in poor decisions and negative outcomes.

First Things First - You must have a system for managing yourself and for focusing on your priorities. I highly recommend a system for tracking your actions hour-by-hour that will help you ask yourself, "How is what I'm doing right now effecting my mission and my goals?" Stephen Covey's time-management matrix is simple, quick and easy way to do just this.

Sharpen the Saw - Have you ever been so busy driving, that you forget to get gas? If you can give yourself at least 20-45 minutes every day for something physical, this will rejuvenate you in ways you aren't aware. In addition to physical exercise, you should take 15 minutes each day to visualize your goals as if you've already achieved them. You should also make time for the leisurely things that make you happy.

I recommend you practice these 3 habits everyday.

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Article Tags: 7 habits of highly effective people, different life, end result, good habits, habit, how to achieve your goals, impulses, knowledge skill, mental shift, motivation, motivational resource, negative outcomes, new thoughts, obstacles, paradigm shift, poor decisions, proactive person, professional goals, seminar workshop, stephen covey



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Re: What I'm reading this weekend - Sept 10, 2010 - Glad you liked it David! I only managed to get partway through the list today because my one year old was looking for some playtime but I did read the Zen Habits one - I love reading Zen Habits while relaxing at a coffee shop!
The 7 Greatest Truths about Successful Women - Picked up a few books on my weekly trip to the library, thought I'd share their tables of contents. The 7 Greatest Truths about Successful Women: How You Can Achieve Financial Independence, Professional Freedom, and Personal Joy, by Marion Luna Brem. From the inside cover: In 1984, battling both cervical and breast cancer, and facing $500,000 in medical bills and a disintegrating marriage, Marion Luna Brem was desperate to find a way to support herself and her two young sons. With more than a few strikes against her, she started knocking on doors, looking for a job. Seventeen doors later, the blunt speaking manager of a car dealership in central TExas declared, "I've been thinking of hiring a broad." And with that invitation, Marion took her own first step on the road to financial independence, yada yada yada Today, this "broad" owns two automobile dealerships, an advertising agency, and a stake in a local bank. She sits on the boards of several businesses, etc. etc. 1. Who Wants to be her own boss? 2. Ladies, Start your engines 3. Resiliency 4. Nurturing 5. Intuition 6. Creativity 7. Passion 8. Self-Value 9. Sensitivity 10. Leadership 11. Balance
Re: My 3 best business books - 1. Think and Grow Rich - Napoleon Hill 2. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People - Stephen R. Covey 3. Permission Marketing - Seth Godin Think and Grow Rich seems more powerful each time I read it or dip into it. The 7 Habits not only offers some very effective ways to organize your life (which I have yet to master!), but also some great quotations and thought provoking statements including this by Nazi concentration camp survivor, Viktor Frankl: [i:2naxzsom]Between stimulus and response, man has the freedom to choose.[/i:2naxzsom] Seth Godin's Permission Marketing is a good read for anybody seeking to understand how to approach doing business on the Internet in the right way with regard to winning people's trust.
Re: What I'm reading this weekend - Sept 10, 2010 - I was also interested in the Zen Habits affiliate programme as it might mix well with my business/japan blog...
Re: Drop out Billionaire - I reveived Bill Bartmann's DVD "9 Steps To Achieve Any Goal" as part of my monthly pack from Success University a few months back. It is a great presentation. I've watched it several times but not for a while so I'll view it again in the coming week. He is one of the greats. Like the best success mentors, he speaks with authority because he has come through much tribulation. His program sounds like a great bargain at $100 a year.


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