5 Toxic Habits to Give up If You Want to Be Successful

If you want more out of life, you don’t need to wait until next year to start making the necessary changes.

I’m confident you can still create your best year yet, even with a few months left.

But you’ll have to do the one thing our brains hate — change.

Change is a necessary part of life. As best-selling author Robin Sharma said, “Change is hard at first, messy in the middle, and gorgeous at the end.”

You must be willing to surrender what you are for what you can become.

Change doesn’t always mean adding things to life, sometimes it means dropping things that are limiting your chances of being successful.

Quit these five things and I promise your life will change for the better.

1. Quit Dwelling on Your Past Failures

While you should always learn from your mistakes, don’t dwell on them and live in the past. Focusing too much on your past will rob you of the present and future.  

To change your focus, do a quick recap of the year thus far. This way you can learn from it and look ahead to the future.

Ask yourself these questions (out loud) and write your answers in a journal:

• What worked in my life thus far?
• What could have I changed thus far? Why didn’t I?
• What held me back from reaching my goals?

Once you have clarity in your past, you can learn and move forward. Without clarity, it’s easy to live the same day, week, and month until it's too late to change.

2. Quit Setting The Wrong Goals

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” — Lao Tzu

In the same journal, create four goals for the next 90 days. Create an outcome goal for each of these areas: health, wealth, social self, and personal enrichment.

As Craig Ballantyne said, “By setting just one goal for these four areas you remain laser-focused on what matters. If you set too many goals, you end up without any priorities at all. Too many ambitious people make that mistake.”

Four goals are the perfect amount. It’s enough to reach all areas but not too many so that you can’t focus on achieving them all. These are known as your big picture, outcome goals. To achieve your outcome goals it's important to create smaller steps, known as process goals.

This helps chunk your big goals into small, achievable, bite-sized pieces to work toward them on a daily basis. Here's a quick example:

Outcome Goal: Lose 10 pounds in the next 90 days

Process Goals:

1. Have one green juice per day
2. Run 12 miles per week
3. Workout with weights 4x per week

Write your goals down, review them each morning and night, and start working toward them to smash your goals.

3. Quit Being Around the Same People

Are your best friends sabotaging your success?

Are they challenging you and making you better or making it easy to settle for mediocrity in your life? Instead of being around the same people, doing the same things, mix it up.

Start being around new people to create new experiences. You need to surround yourself with people who remind you more of your future — not of your past.

If your inner circle is dragging you down, it’s time to audit your friends. If they aren’t helping you, they’re hurting you.

It might finally be time to find some new, uplifting, and positive friends. The problem is that it isn’t always easy to find them. Unless you reverse engineer your chance of meeting like-minded people.

How?

Attending seminars and events on topics, and with people, that you want to be around. I challenge you to attend at least one new seminar or local event in 2018.

Buy the ticket now to hold yourself accountable. The most successful people in the world are always growing and developing.

4. Quit Starting The Day Reactive

If you still start your day hitting the snooze, rushing to work, and cursing the traffic for being late, that is 100% your fault. Become intentional with your mornings by being proactive, not reactive.

Start the morning on your terms by getting up earlier and focusing on the #1 priority in your life -- yourself. Even if it’s waking up 10 minutes earlier, a morning routine can set your day up for success.

Do one of these of these rituals for 10 minutes each morning before checking your email, texting or scrolling through social media.

• Write your goals down in a journal
• Meditate (Learn the 4-step guide on how to meditate)
• Read something inspiring
• Watch motivational videos

You’ll start the day refreshed, energized, and ready to win the day.

5. Quit Relying on Willpower

As the #1 writer on Medium, Benjamin Hardy, said in Willpower Doesn’t Work, "Willpower is a muscle, like any muscle it can be overworked and fail."

Instead of relying on your willpower muscle, change your environment to make it easier to accomplish your goals. You are who you are because of your environment.

If you want to change then change your environment, stop the willpower madness already. For example, if you want to start running each morning, lay out your shoes so you literally roll out of bed into them.

If you want to quit eating that food that kills your diet, don’t have it in the house. In fact,  don’t even bother going down that aisle in the store. Once you're clear on your goals (Step 2) it'll be easy to eliminate willpower.

Start Creating a Better Life Today

Don’t slog through the rest of the year and decide to wait until next year to start living the life you deserve. Drop these five toxic habits and become the ultimate version of yourself. 

You don’t need to wait until next week, next month or next year to start changing your life. Remember, improving isn’t always about adding to your life. Sometimes, it’s about dropping the things that are holding you back from success.