Managing Your Habits for Success

Leaders must manage themselves. 

Habits are behaviors people develop in response to situations they encounter repeatedly. Managing yourself requires observing and evaluating your everyday habits, analyzing whether they help or impede your progress toward your goals, and determining how to improve them. 

When your habits become ingrained, stimuli can trigger habitual responses without your conscious awareness. Instead of reacting without thinking, try to become aware of your habits so you can judge whether they help you or if you want to revisit them. Recognizing your habits enables you to change them.

Your habits reflect your beliefs about the world.

Your convictions – the ideas and concepts you accept as true – shape your attitudes and behavior. For example, if you think that working hard is essential to attaining something you want, such as a promotion, you are more likely to work hard.

Your assumptions derive from ideas and information you have gathered from your environment and other significant people in your life. The people who raised you probably influenced you the...