Hi, this is Cyril from Work Smarter: Live Better. In this short video, I want to talk about a simple topic: How to change habits?
I was doing a workshop recently with the leadership team of a large pharmaceutical company and one of their persons asked me this question, he said “Cyril, I understand what you’re talking about, simple advice, really simple tools, I really understand that it but my worry is how am I going to transform my habits? How am I going to change this into habits?”
In more than 10 years working with many people in small or large organization, I’ve realized that working smarter is both easy and hard. It’s easy because the principles of working smarter, the principles of efficiency, the principles of effectiveness, the principles of person productivity are not that hard, so it’s easy. The hard part is changing habits, the hard part is fighting against years and years of doing the same thing in the same way. And then, learning something new and then de-learning and re-learning.
So I got five simple suggestions for you if you really want to challenge your work habits.
My first one is Find Your Why. You need to start with why you want to do this? If you don’t have a strong why, we can show you as many how as you want, it’s never going to work. Your why may be “I’m feeling stressed all the time at work “, “I’m not performing as well as I could”, “I’m working too long hours”, “I’m not spending enough time with my kids”, “My health is struggling”. Find your Why, that’s my first advice.
My second is, learn from a proven methods. Learn from a proven methods. What do I mean by that? Rather than reinvent the wheel yourself, go and see some specialists, read the right books, learn the right methodology but learn from a proven one.
My third one is Select a few How. As you’re learning, you’re not going to change everything in one go, just select the few how and just focus on these.
My fourth one is on the few how, just do it. Practice it, straightaway. Don’t wait for it, just do it.
And my last one is, persist for 21 days. Little by little, repeat everyday what you’re doing your How and persist for a little while.
This is this week’s Work Smarter: Live Better tip. I hope you enjoy it. If you got any suggestions to make, if you want to share an idea that could be useful to everyone about what you suggest to change your work habits, please leave a comment below and let’s continue the discussion here.
You have a lovely day, thank you very much.
