Unlock Your Potential | Build Powerful Habits with These Simple Rituals

Good morning, Believe Nation. Today we're going to talk about how you can build good habits.

You're going to need to get yourself some rituals. Right now, every one of you in this room is controlled by your rituals. I don't just mean this one. I mean every morning you get up. I know your body. I can look at your body right now, and I can guess your rituals. Some of you, your ritual is to work out 5 times a week. I can see it clearly. 4 to 6 times a week, it's obvious. 'Cause you couldn't look like that if you didn't do that. Some form of workout. I don't care if it's walking, lifting, whatever. Some of you, it's obvious that lifting weights is part of it. You can see by that man's muscles. I know. I know what his rituals are. Because your life comes from your rituals. If you don't develop the ritual, You're kidding yourself. How many agree with me on this? Raise your hand and say, "Aye." And there are rituals that put you in state and there are rituals that take you out of state.

I know you all have big goals, big dreams, big aspirations just like I do. You've got ambitions to become an amazing person, to build your career, to create, to contribute, to give, to be an awesome human being, but all of that is impossible without great habits set up, if you don't have routine and structure set up in a way that will keep you on track, then you'll fall off. And having new goals without new habits is kind of like, you know, having a new car without wheels. You know, the habits are the wheels. They're the things that make you able to achieve the goals. So you gotta have good habits. But the challenge for most people isn't that knowledge. I mean, you know you need to have good habits, it's you can't keep the habit going, right? Have you ever started at the new year, you're gonna get healthier, and you start that habit of working out on a more regular basis, and then it goes away? Or you say, you know, I'm gonna be more kind and more patient and more awesome to my partner, my lover, and you start being nice for 2 or 3 days, and then on the 4th day you're a jerk, you know? And you're like, what happened? I said I was gonna be nicer. It's that you didn't set up the most important thing you needed to maintain a habit. You have to set up trigger moments to activate your habits. What do I mean by that? Well, let's say you want to become a better person. You know, you want to become more kind, more patient, more loving with people. Now you can just set that intention or write that down in your vision, in your journal, or set up on a vision board that you look at once in a while, but in day-to-day life, it's not enough. You need things to trigger you, to remind you to be that particular kind of person, right? It's almost like if you could have a little angel speaking in your ear all day long to tell you what to do and how to be, you'd obviously become better. Well, that makes sense. Well, let's use that idea. Let's use that idea by setting up alarms on our phones that trigger us to do the very things we need to do. This is gonna be so basic you're gonna laugh, and then I'll also tell you how I've literally taught this to Fortune 50 CEOs and they said it was the one thing that changed their life the most dramatically. So let's start with this. Let's have a goal in mind. Let's say you want to become more present and calm throughout the day. Again, you could write that down on a journal. I'm gonna be more present and calm. You could meditate in the morning, say, "Today I'm gonna be more present and calm." And you could start out with good intentions, but those fall apart without a trigger moment set up throughout the day to remind you that. So what if you did this? What if you just set up on your phone 3 alarms during the day with a label that said, "Close your eyes, take 10 deep breaths in, remind yourself to be calm." So let's say you're going through your day, it's crazy, right? It's 10 AM and all of a sudden, bing, your phone goes off, you look down and it says, "Close your eyes, take 10 deep breaths." And then again, it happens at 2 o'clock. And again it happens at 6:00 PM, and again it happens at 8:00 PM. What's gonna happen? You always look at your phone, don't you? It's gonna go throughout the day, you're gonna forget. And the funniest thing is, I've had so many people do this worldwide, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of people I've taught to do this, hundreds of thousands. And they tell me all the time, that changed everything. And you'll think once you set it up that the next day you'll forget about it. No, that alarm will go off, you forgot you set the dang alarm, there it goes off in your face, you're like, All right, I'm trying to be calmer and more present. Close my eyes, take 10 deep breaths, reground myself, here we go. You can't do it once a day. You have to have moments throughout the day that trigger you to enact the new behavior. I know this makes sense to you, but it's a challenge for a lot of people because they never set those things up. So what if you did it with an alarm? So for example, for me on the opposite spectrum, I don't want to just be calmer and more present, I want more energy. Throughout the day. So here's what I do, one of my big trigger moments is every time my butt hits a chair, I don't care if I'm on a plane or I was like where we're shooting here, I wrote a lot of my books here. I wrote The Motivation Manifesto here, I wrote The Charge here, and if I'm going to write, my butt hits the chair, I grab my phone, I open the timer, and I set 50 minutes. Now at 50 minutes the timer goes bzzz, it starts buzzing, and I look at that and I go, "Oh, that's my trigger to get energy." So I stand up, I go get some water, I take a glass of water, drink it down, I do some stretches and I do some exercise just really briefly, or I'll go for a walk, whatever it is, but I'll do something that usually takes just 2 to 5 minutes. Then I'll sit back down, I'll set that 50-minute alarm, and I'll work. And what that does is every 50 minutes it triggers me to change how I'm physically moving, it changes my attention so that throughout the day I'm continually refreshed. So I never have that 2, 3, 4 o'clock time where I'm like, ah, you know, why? Because I've triggered my day so that my energy is maintained throughout the day. Makes sense, right? This could be as simple as, let's say you wanna be healthier in your life. Okay, let's set up some trigger moments for you in this way. Let's say every time you drop off the kids, on the way back to the house, you stop at the grocery store and get some fresh produce. That's just a trigger. It's like, okay, did one thing, drop kids off. Now tied to that, triggered from that action, drop kids off is go to health food store. Or let's say you want to get healthier in the morning. One of the easiest ways to help people maintain a better exercise program is this: set a trigger. You wake up in the morning, your first action is to drink water. Put your exercise shoes on, might get dressed if you were naked, just saying. So you get dressed, put your shoes on, you go downstairs or you go to the gym and that's the trigger. You woke up, you do these actions. Nothing interrupts those actions, that's the action. And you have to have those set up. One of my other favorite trigger moments to set up is doorframe triggers. What do you mean by that? When you walk into a new room, to have a psychological trigger go off in your mind that you've associated with that doorframe. So let me give you an example. If I walk into my house at night after, like, if I've been working all day and I'm gonna walk in, I'm gonna see my lady, I have it so when I ever walk through the doors of my house, 3 words repeat off immediately in my mind because I've done it so many times consciously. I went to the door, I said the 3 words, said the 3 words, said the 3 words, And I did this so many times that now when I walk through a door, my mind automatically triggers those 3 words and I remember to be those 3 words. So what words would you love to have describe you as a person that you would be happy if that was how people described you? What would those words be? Have those and now set them up in your life. I teach executives to do this as well. I have them have a doorframe trigger when they walk into their office in the morning. As soon as they walk through that doorframe, they have boom, 3 words go through their mind about how they want to be perceived as a leader. I have them set up another doorframe. Every time they walk into a meeting, into the conference room, when they walk through the doors of the conference room, they have another 3 words that trigger off for them. And it just reminds them how to be. So these aren't big, crazy things. A lot of people, they think they have to completely change their life. What would change your life completely is setting up more trigger moments and associations that when you see something, you do this. That when this action is taken, then that happens. That when you have the opportunity to set up alarms on your phone, you set them up so that you're interrupted in your everyday life to remind yourself to stick to the habits, to stick to the the intention. You do that enough on a continual basis, you'll find yourself in so many ways completely rejuvenated, and I promise you'll stick to your habits even more. And once you do that, you know that everything changes.

The best way to maintain a habit is not to expect yourself to follow it at all times. Number two is to simultaneously recognizing that adherence to habits ebbs and flows. The problem, the mistake that people make is they say, "All right, I've had this diet, I just digressed, therefore I should just throw it all out and I'm gonna eat cookies for the next 6 months because I had one cookie." And I think that is flawed on a lot of levels. There are tools you can use like Lift, which I'm involved with, which was incubated by the Twitter guys out of Obvious. But ultimately, the last point I'll make is one new habit at a time. The best way to avoid abandoning new habits is to only adopt one at a time. And one of the issues with cooking— this will be my last point— is when people say, "I wanna learn how to cook," they're typically trying to adopt 5 or so new habits at a time. Grocery shopping, prep, cooking, cleaning. Of course you're gonna fail. So just picking one at a time is really important.

Try to make the new habits earlier in the day, okay? It's a lot easier to take a habit that you've already created that's already running and kind of move it a little bit later in the day than it is to create a new habit later in the day. So, uh, for example, if you want to focus your time in uninterrupted blocks, start by focusing the first hour of your day in an uninterrupted focused block every single day where you're working on something important. Make it a habit. Make it a ritual.

Give yourself a reward of some kind for practicing the new behavior. Each time you reward yourself, you reaffirm and reinforce that behavior. Soon you begin to associate at an unconscious level the pleasure of the reward with the behavior. You set up your own force field of positive consequences that you unconsciously look forward to as a result of engaging in that behavior or habit that you've decided upon.

What's an area in your life right now that you really want to improve? What's an area that's important to improve? Your body's great? How about your career? Career's great? How about your relationships? Intimate one especially, or your kids, or your relationship with your creator, spiritual side of your life, or is it your finances? Figure an area that really matters, decide on that area. Number 1, write down what your life is like in that area right now, as specifically as possible. So you might say, well, I'm 13.5 pounds overweight, you know, I'm whatever the weight is, whatever the situation is, or my body fat's like this, or I wake up exhausted in the morning, and you write the truth of where you are right now so you're real clear. Or I'm not in a relationship. I say I want a relationship, but I'm not in one, and I don't seem to find them. All the good ones seem to be gone is my belief, you know, and I really do want one, but I don't have it. Whatever your definition. I'm in a relationship, and God, I wish I wasn't in a relationship. I'm planning my escape. Wherever you are, or I have a wonderful relationship, we love each other, but there just isn't enough passion. Just write the truth of where you are. The area you wanna change, but write how it is. And then the second step is, and this is where you gotta be really honest with yourself, what are the rituals that have put me there? Because whatever results you're getting, even if you don't like the results, there's some rituals that are keeping you in that place. There's some rituals of what you eat or don't eat, how you move or don't move, how you sleep or don't sleep. There's some rituals in the lack of variety or spice or energy or focus in an area. There's something you're doing, and it's usually not one thing, it's a bunch of little things that you kind of do consistently. Whenever you think about getting in a relationship, whenever you think about working out, whenever you think about money, you get yourself in a state of overwhelm. You start thinking about all the things you can't control. Just write down all the rituals you have, and then here's the third step. What do you want? What's your vision? And be really specific. I wanna be my fighting weight. I wanna be the strongest I've ever felt. I wanna be, I'm gonna turn my, whatever it is, be specific. And then last step, number 4, what are the rituals that'll get you there? What would you need to do differently each morning if you're gonna be that kind of energy, that kind of strength? How would you have to, how often would you work out? What days would you work out? What time? A ritual is something you do consistently, usually at a specific time, so it becomes automatic. Let me tell you something, willpower doesn't last, but rituals can last a lifetime. I bet you have some rituals in your life right now you've been doing for years. Even though some of them don't serve you. I'm just saying, wake yourself up.

Make—

if you want a new year and a new life, you don't need to start on January 1st. Start today. Start with this little video and just begin to see what happens and see how easy it is to just do a few little rituals. Don't do them all, just do 2 or 3 new things. And you know what happens? You'll get momentum. Because once you discipline yourself in one area of your life, you feel yourself doing it in other areas as well. And I always say something that My original teacher taught me, I always remind people, there's always two pains in life. There's the pain of discipline or there's the pain of regret. And discipline weighs ounces, as my friend Jim Rohn taught me, regret weighs tons. You don't wanna have regret. So right now, what do you wanna change? What's it really like? What are the rituals that got you there? That'll take a little homework. If you're not sure, ask the people around you, they'll tell you what your rituals are. What do I really want in depth? What are the rituals that'll get me there? And then get yourself to start a few of those actions and lock 'em in place.

Thank you so much for watching. I made this video because Live Life Lovely asked me to. So if there's a topic you'd like us to cover in the next edition of Believe Life, leave it in the comments below and I'll see what I can do. I'd also love to know how do you build good habits? What do you do? For me, it's one about first understanding that there is a problem that I need to change. I think too many people walk through life unaware of their limiting beliefs and bad habits. So first is awareness. Two is if I want to build a good habit, I add it to my schedule. I block off time and put it in my calendar. I don't just try to rush in and say, well, someday, or today I'm going to try to do it. I make time for it in my schedule. And then three, I'll commit to somebody else. Like, I'm here filming on video day for my channel because Jason, my cameraman, is here. I committed to him to come. I've committed to you guys to make videos. And when you commit to other people, you're much more likely to follow through. So awareness, make time for it, commit to others. That's how I built them. I'm curious as to how you build them. Leave in the comments below. I'm going to join in the discussion. Thank you so much for watching. Have an amazing day. Continue to believe, and I'll see you soon.