Six tips for your clients to create new habits in 2014

Creating new positive habits can make a significant difference in one’s life and provide the skills to turn the impossible into the possible. But it’s not always easy to change our behaviour as Tony Schwartz of the Energy Project(1) reveals with the statistics below…

· 25% of people abandon their New Years’ resolution(s) after just one week
· 95% of people who lose weight on a diet regain it
· Most alarming is that after surviving a heart attack only 1 in 7 people make any enduring life changes around eating or exercise.


So you can see we are indeed creatures of habit and some behaviors become so ingrained, such as smoking or biting our nails that we can’t stop even if we want to. In fact, Massachusetts Institute of Technology research has identified two regions in the brain that are responsible for crystallising habits so it’s no wonder we find it so hard to break them.

Making positive choices to start the pattern of change

In order to break habits, we must start our own patterns of change which according to Chris Gardner (the man on whom the film ‘The Pursuit of Happiness’ was based), centers around our ability to embrace the best within and make positive choices for ourselves. (2)

In his retelling of his battle to come out of poverty and homelessness, he suggested four key choices to begin this process of change:


1) Choose to let go of judgment and accept who you are at your best
2) Choose to break generational cycles
3) Choose to accept that you are allowed to be happy and have abundance; and
4) Choose to learn from the past.


Now it isn’t easy to act on this advice, but by simply sharing these choices with your clients, you will be helping them start on their own path to making better decisions for themselves and their families.
Why your expert help is critical in this process

With the stress of daily life upon your clients, applying these choices and making time for what’s important can be extremely difficult. This is where you and your expertise fit into the picture.

When sharing these tips with your clients your role is two-fold. Firstly, you can help your clients understand the importance of freeing up their time as much as possible to focus on the important choices they have to make. Secondly, you can help your clients understand the areas where they can enlist your expert help so they have more time to focus on what’s important to them and what will add value to their lives.

Take John for example. I’m sure we could all relate to him…
John is a small business owner married to Kate a teacher and they have two children 13 and 10. John is trying to: Run the business; be a good husband; be a good father, keep a handle on the finances, keep fit, maintain his friendships, mentor his staff, fit in a family holiday at some point and maintain the condition of his home…..Something has got to give!!

With his energy focused on so many activities, where would John find the time to make better choices and start making changes to his lifestyle?

Today we call it outsourcing, the Babylonians(3) called it “…one of the cures for a lean purse” – either way, the message is clear – John needs to outsource the things that he is no good at or not qualified to do so that he can have more time to focus on what’s important to him and what adds value to his life.

So for John this meant joining a small business peer group, hiring a trainer for his staff, seeing a financial adviser and matching exercise with his friendship group. By doing this he freed up time for what was really important to him - being a good husband and father.

Six tips for your clients to create new habits
John was able to free up his time to focus on making change and you can help your clients implement positive changes in their lives too. But it’s important to remember that change takes time and there will be some resistance along the way.

Try these six tips to help your clients on their journey:


1) Don’t change everything at once: One or two things at a time
2) It takes about a month to lock in a new behavior

3) Be precise about what you want to change

4) Focus on a positive outcome rather than the negatives

5) Expect resistance (especially from yourself)

6) Enlist the support of others


Whether it’s finances in 2014 that are a priority, the estate plan, getting the right insurance cover or even talking about the no sugar diet (and that’s a tough one, I know from personal experience), it’s important your clients know they can talk to you and understand how you can help.
Ultimately for clients and advisers alike, by enlisting the help of others through outsourcing (as you would know), you can free up your time to make better choices and to start the journey towards creating new positive habits that will have a great impact on our lives.


1) “The Energy Project” www.theenergyproject.com
2) “The Pursuit of Happiness” Chris Gardner 2006
3) “The Richest Man in Babylon” George S. Clason 1926.

The Psychology of Positive Thinking

Positive affirmations, "serenity now", calling for that moment of calm in a sea of turmoil….does any of it actually work?

Well apparently the answer is a resounding YES! And even more importantly scientific evidence points to the positive impact on life, satisfaction with life and well being and reduced stress that a positive outlook : optimism can have. Optimism is indeed a key part of stress management.

According to the Mayo Clinic, realistic optimism, allows you to approach daily life stressors in better and sometimes more creative ways. But to do so requires you to eliminate negative self talk.

Negative self talk is borne out of life experience but also from the perception and processing of information with a negative bias. The two are intrinsically linked. Experience of bullying about personal appearance such as freckles, brings with it perceptions of what is and what is not attractive. When layered with messages from cosmetics companies, TV, social media : the initial experience is reinforced and a belief is set. That negative belief is increasingly more difficult to overcome the more ingrained it has become either over time or by the constancy and frequency of the reinforcement mechanisms.

So simply saying to someone "you need to be positive" is really no help what so ever if a belief system is strongly held.

Positivity or rather the ability to see things differently requires the practice of creative and critical thinking about a subject. It requires analysis of why something is this way and what other ways could a subject, issue, thought, action be perceived, processed and assessed.

What is required is multiple thinking lines. While the natural state for many of us is to look at "what is wrong", the mindset shift needs to move to asking "what is right here" or "how can I look at this differently".

It takes practice. And initially it requires some form of imprinting to enable a different thought process to take hold.

Writing the issue down and transforming the thoughts to what is possible is a great start.

So what's wrong with your life right now? Write it down….

And what's right with your life right now? Start writing it down…..

Now if you are in a job that you're not enjoying because you feel undervalued and under appreciated, you are single and want to be in a relationship, if friends around you seem so happy (Facebook tells you so), you're not the weight, shape you want to be, you don't have enough money to do the things you want to do ….and so on and so on…..maybe your list of what's wrong with your life is getting pretty long.

Those are big issues. It may even be worse, there may be trauma and hardship and sickness surrounding you. There is no illusion here that you are not facing challenges.

What we are asking here is to just digest the information differently.

So maybe your "what's right with my life" list is going to start with small things.

….I'm alive today

..I heard a bird chirp the morning awake

..best piece of toast ever

..I saw a smile on a childs face

..I heard something on the radio that made me laugh

You getting the idea?

So what about that main issue you may have? No matter how bad it is, can you get a different perspective? Maybe not now not in moments of absolute desperate grief. No one could possibly ask that. But sometimes thats when gratefulness comes.

It's about changing the process of thinking through an idea and drawing into your life by attraction that which is what you want to attract not what you want to run away from.

Even in your darkest moments : asking for a way through, wanting to feel better …..is a start.