How positive habits help develop self image

Pete Wilkinson: One of the things you talk about is that successful people have successful habits. I think most people can understand how that works. How do you go about defining those and making them real in your life, as it were?

Grant Leboff: Habits are very important, in fact it’s really all about habits. What I think is important is that if you can start to build your successful habits then you start to build routines. One of the great habits that I form now is, I have a new successful habit every business quarter. These habits don’t have to be complex. They could be simple things like better diary management. It could be simple things like starting your day a certain way and finishing your day a certain way. The concept you want to have in your mind is that; if you start building these habits in a sequential way, say one a quarter, in 3 years you’ve got between 10-12 new habits.

It’s a very simple way of doing it. I think sometimes people over think it. For me, keeping the habits really simple, so reading one business book a month, is a great habit. A jog that leads up with press-ups, doing 4 sets of 25 press-ups a day is a really great habit. Making sure you start the week with a successful outcome in mind of what a week’s going to look like is a great habit. They don’t have to be complicated, but for me it is all about habits.

Pete Wilkinson: How does one, then, define your habit … One business book a month, let’s just say, so that’s going to be my habit, I’m going to read a business book a month, just for an example. How does one then stick to it? I think the world is full of people, certainly that I meet, who always have great intentions. I can imagine someone getting up on March 1st and saying, “Right, from now on my new habit is a business book a month.”

Grant Leboff: Yes.

Pete Wilkinson: That first week of March, they really read nicely. The second week of March something happens at work, “Aw,” I’m going to struggle. By May they can barely remember doing it. How do you make it a habit rather than a good idea?

Grant Leboff: Okay, I think to cement it 3 things you need is KSD: Knowledge, Skill, Desire. Sometimes you might have to increase your knowledge to form a new habit. One of mine was personal development and personal organization. I had to learn how to be personally organized. The S is for Skill, you need to be prepared to practice. Some people start something, whatever it might be, but they just don’t commit and they don’t practice it. The last thing is Desire, probably the most important thing. If you’re going to form a new habit, be clear in your mind before you begin the formation as to why you want to form that habit. What’s the desire? For me it was quite simple, become better at personal organization, take nine weeks a year holiday; quite simple. I would focus on the outcome being having the lots of holidays, which enabled me to stick to forming that habit, which was the skill of it and then knowledge, I increased my knowledge about advanced diary systems. For me, knowledge, skill, desire helps you to formulate a habit and then stick to it, remembering why you want to form that habit, which is the desire.

Pete Wilkinson: I understand the importance of desire, it makes sense. How do you define that in real terms? What I mean by that is I can imagine someone has the desire to lose weight, for example, and they really do, I mean they really, really want to lose weight, they talk about it all the time, but they start their healthy eating habit. They’re going to eat X amount of fruit a day, or whatever it is, and it falls by the wayside. They’ll tell you, “No, I really did want to lose weight.” Where does that sort of mismatch between desire and not quite sticking to it happen? How do you prevent that happening?

Grant Leboff: One thing that you need to really think about is how people see themselves. This is linking it to self image. With weight loss, for example, or exercise, you need to change at the off set how you see yourself. If you hear people say things like, “Oh, I’m just always late.” Well, trying to form a habit of being on time, when you see yourself as always being late, isn’t going to work. If someone wants to become an exerciser and just say, “Yeah, but my life is just too chaotic,” they’ve already decided with their image that they aren’t able to do that. The way at the start, go right back a step, is to look at the self image.

If we looked at business books, for example, if you build the image about, “I’m the sort of person who reads a business book,” then I’m going to record three key learnings, then I’m going to implement that and look for something that has happened positively because of that habit, then you start building that loop. That helps with the desire.

Pete Wilkinson: Is it the story you tell yourself?

Grant Leboff: It is the story you tell yourself and how you see yourself. It’s almost like a thermostat. The thermostat is set at 20 degrees and you want to get hotter. You have to change the thermostat. If it stays where it is it isn’t going to get any hotter. That’s the same with yourself. Self image is very, very important in becoming the best version of you, which is linked to building habits.

There may be small changes to the spoken word in this transcript in order to facilitate the readability of the written English