Creating Good Habits

Creating Good Habits

Follow these steps to develop good habits in your daily life, and to kick-start positive change.

1. Identify What you Want to Achieve

First, note down your personal and professional goals. You'll need to develop new habits to achieve these goals, so it's important that you're clear about what they are.
Now choose one goal, and think about the habits that you'll need to incorporate into your schedule to reach it. What do you need to start doing every day to make this vision a reality?

2. Build Good Habits Into Your Routine

Find ways to build your new habit into your routine. Block out a regular time for it in your schedule, so that you can give your positive habit your full attention.

3. Reflect on Your Habits

As you progress with your new habit, reflect on how it's working for you. If you're struggling to stick to it, think about why this is. Were you too ambitious? If so, consider setting a more manageable short-term goal to remotivate yourself.
Or, if your new habit isn't delivering the change that you expected, reflect on what's gone wrong. You may need to tweak your habit to make sure that it's delivering real change

The Power of Good Habits

Using High-Performance
Habits to Achieve Significant Goals

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Good habits make positive change part of your daily life.

© iStockphoto/enot-poloskun

If you've ever learned to play a sport or taken up a new personal interest, you'll know how satisfying it can feel to reach a significant goal.
As well as learning something new, you've changed yourself for the better. That's an empowering thought!
Good habits lie behind many of these positive changes. The repeated actions – attending a weekly sports practice, for example – help you to build the change into your daily life.
In this article, we'll discuss how good habits can help you grow, personally and professionally.

How Goals Affect Habits

You are more likely to achieve worthwhile goals if you have good habits.
Illustrating this, a 2007 study suggested that we're not motivated by goals alone. In fact, once we've decided upon a goal, we're more motivated – on a day-by-day basis – by the habits that we have set up to reach it, than by the goal itself.
We're also motivated by reflecting on our progress towards our goals. A 2010 study reinforced this: here, researchers monitored people who were trying to form better eating habits. They found that those who were encouraged to reflect on how they were doing, and who adjusted their habits accordingly, were ultimately more successful.

Live the moment

" Life is what happens to you while you are making other plans".
John Lennon

It is so true...we are so busy planning and working and worrying life has a way of just passing by.

Live the moment.

I find myself repeating this line to remind me to just shut it down and stop thinking so much and just -
-live the moment-.

It is hard sometimes , and even harder now that we are connected 24/7 by email and the Internet.
But life will pass us by if we are not conscious of it. Stop - look up- and live the moment.

Rather you are just hanging out in the backyard or you are on vacation or just hanging with the family , take the time to enjoy it. Tomorrow will be here soon enough. Repeat it to yourself so that it remains on your forefront of your mind...live the moment.

Put down that electronic device, shut off the phone, that's right shut it off- (even for just a few hours)- look up and look around. Take a deep breath, now exhale and do it again.

Life is short...LIVE THE MOMENT.

Jerry Maguire

I saw this and just thought I would share..

I’ve always found it difficult to pinpoint my core values because I believe that as humans, we are always changing and adapting to our environment.
Then, I happened to catch Jerry Maguire while flipping through television, right at the pivotal scene in which Jerry admits that he’s not happy with the state of his life or his job:

"Two nights later in Miami at our corporate conference, a breakthrough. Breakdown? Breakthrough. It was the oddest, most unexpected thing. I began writing what they call a Mission Statement for my company. You know — a Mission Statement — a suggestion for the future. What started out as one page became 25. Suddenly I was my father’s son. I was remembering the simple pleasures of this job, how I ended up here out of law school, the way a stadium sounds when one of my players performs well on the field… And suddenly it was all pretty clear. The answer was fewer clients. Caring for them, caring for ourselves, and the games too. Starting our lives, really. Hey, I’ll be the first to admit it. What I was writing was somewhat ‘touchy feely.’ I didn’t care.”

 


Everywhere you look, the word “core” is touted as important – to have a healthy body, you must build up your core muscles. When looking for a new job, you need to find something that matches your core competencies. When considering a romantic relationship, you search for someone with the same core values. Without a strong core, everything else just seems … lacking.
So it goes without saying that if your organization’s core values drive your business objectives, then employees need to understand and align themselves with it, even if they don’t always agree with it. Otherwise, your business objectives are likely not being met.

Your work

I work so I can live....I do not live so I can work.

I have worked full time since I was 17 and I will be 56 this year...that is a long time and I have learned every step of the way.

I enjoyed every challenge. My first job I moved up from stock boy to manager, I was the youngest store manager in a  chain retail store , at 21 I ran a million dollar store. I watched and learned and just kind of naturally progressed because I saw how it was done but more important I saw how to improve how it was done. I enjoyed learning about people and how to train and motivate, sometimes without even knowing that was what I was doing, I just fell into that role. I went on and set record numbers of increase in a already successful store.

I changed jobs because I had a young family and wanted more security and opportunity so a friend of mine suggested I put in for his job because he was moving up into sales. he dispatched servicemen for Honeywell. I knew nothing about it but applied because it looked like a good opportunity. I was hired and once again I found myself learning and watching and I reshaped how they dispatched and did their inventory room completely over. I liked the people and the company but once again I found myself looking for my security. Their main office was in Minnesota and I worked in R.I., I wanted to work for someone that knew me, I did not just want to be a number. Enter Paul Arpin's.

Arpin was a family owned business in my backyard. I answered a ad for a customer care person. I did not feel it was for me but they asked me back to interview, this time with David Arpin. David asked me to join their dispatch and he was very honest and sincere. I knew nothing about the household business but I now had 8 years of business and learning people to look back on.

I joined Arpin in 1985 and worked my way up to Senior Vice President. When I joined we did about 7 million dollars and we are now a 200 million dollar company. I had a small hand in that I hope. I certainly learned the most here and I am still learning every day. I reshaped how they dispatched and have implemented a complete computerized dispatch that still has our personal touch that Paul Arpin demanded but helps send and gather data and information without today's technology. Because as he said time and time again- without our drivers we are nothing- being a driver once himself he always built that into my DNA.-
Respect- others- work hard- and then work a little harder !

All that said I do not think my work is what defines me. My family defines me and at the end of the day that is where I have my most pride. I certainly am proud of my accomplishments and I am blessed to have met and hopefully helped many people along the way but when my kids first said daddy I heart melted, and it still does. Then they grow up and your grand kids come in and they call you Papa.
Life just does not get better.

I love working...and I love challenges and learning and training and motivating. It is pretty cool to shape and re-shape and step back and see what you have done.

Your work certainly does help define who you are but in the end your relationships, friends and family is what you truly embrace.

It is all a part of each other.

A reminder

Last week was a reminder on how precious life is and how vulnerable we all are.

Boston is about one hour from R.I., where I live and work and that is where the Boston bombings took place.

Innocent lives lost.

Lives changed in a instant.

Another reminder on how precious our lives are and how we just never know when and if it will take a turn.

Take today to stop the worries, to stop the hustle and bustle and thank God for all the blessings and the people in your life. Take a big inhale and exhale and take a look around.

Enjoy the day and pray for those who's lives were changed through this ordeal and for all those that may be going through a tough time.

And to all those people in my live at work on in my family I say thank you and may God bless each and every one of you.

Driving

How cool is it to be your own boss and to see the Country?

That is the opportunity that drivers have.

And mix in having the opportunity to effect another person's life and you have a pretty cool job.

Drivers in the household moving industry have all that.
They enter a person's life in what is one of their most trying times, when they have to pack up all their belongings and say good bye to loved ones and friends and move hundreds or thousands of miles way.

That is their challenge.

They are away from home themselves, and separated from their loved ones but they need to put that aside and do their job and in that that job they find it necessary to comfort the people in front of them too.

It takes a special kind of person.

That said it is those bonds that they make that have a tough time duplicating elsewhere.
At the end of a stressful move when that mother or wife or mom or dad hugs them and looks them in the eye and says thank you- wow- that is a pretty good feeling.
That is what hooks them...that is their true reward.

How great it is to have a job that allows you to be your own boss, see the country, meet people from all over the map and befriend them !
Pretty special.

Times can get tough but on those days that stressful we all need to remember what is good about what we do and the true rewards that we draw for it. It is not always about the money, actually most times our true rewards are not always monetary.