How To Set Yourself Up For Success Without Relying On Willpower
You already know the successful habits you should be doing. You don’t need to rely on willpower to do your daily habits. You can set yourself up for success once these success habits become part of your daily routine. Watch the video to know how to set yourself up for success without relying on willpower.
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This is Prakhar from DesignEpicLife.com, here to help you design your epic life. In the last episode, we talked about how to do 1 to 3-month sprints to take your life to the next level. In this episode, we’re looking over the habits you can do every day so that you can set up yourself for success without relying on willpower. Let’s get going.
There’s actually a reason behind why you don’t feel motivated when it’s time to do your daily habits and that reason is decision fatigue. You see if you have to think every day when and what to do you’ll set yourself up for failure because you’ll use all your energy into making decisions, making a plan. But if you have a plan already before even starting your day then everything goes smoothly.
It just takes a few days to adapt to a habit and then it becomes part of your life just like brushing your teeth or eating food. So you need to have systems in place so that your every day is intentionally designed for success.
For example, you can make a pre-planned time and routine for doing your most important work. Maybe it’s 30 minutes in the morning maybe it’s right before sleeping. It really depends on your life and the time that you have but you need to have these systems in place.
If you miss a day, it’s okay but don’t miss two days in a row. And if you do miss twice in a row, then be mindful and get back to your routine as soon as possible. Just be mindful for why you’ve gotten off track and solve that problem because it’s your responsibility to get back on track as soon as you can.
For each habit, you want to keep a minimum threshold that you can do every day to call it a success. Maybe it’s just 30 seconds of meditation. This way you will avoid perfectionism and think that you need the perfect time or the conditions to do your habits. Just do the minimum and call it done. Slow progress is better than no progress. But at the same time, set average standards for yourself that you will do on most days.
Another thing you want to do is craft your environment so you take willpower out of the equation. How do you do that? For your deep work, you can close the door, you can put your phone on the airplane mode and keep it away from yourself.
Or maybe a trying to change your eating habits in which case make a rule of only keeping healthy foods at home so at least at home you will eat what is available to you. That’s how you craft your surroundings so that you need to use the least amount of willpower to get maximum results.
For your daily success habits, don’t measure the outcome because that is too small of a time to see what results you are getting. There is a time for measuring outcome but in this case, you’re measuring your behavior that means if you do what you planned to do then you can say that you had a successful day.
Then on the weekly or monthly basis, you can measure your outcomes. If your behaviors are helping to get what you want. If not, reflect on how you can tweak or change your behavior so that you can get a better outcome.
For your weekly reviews, write what you did and then write what you’ll do next week. And for your daily reviews, you don’t need to write a lot, you can just write a few words about what happened, what you did, what came in your way and what you learned, and write down what you’ll do tomorrow. Just one thing that is the most important thing that you’ll do tomorrow
Try to be the hero in your journal. That means at the end of the day you want to write something like, I planned to do ‘this’ and even though something happened, I managed to do at least ‘that’ and I am proud of myself. This is what you want to say at the end of your day.
Make yourself proud. And if you do that on most days, you’ll be surprised how fast you’ll progress. So get your life in order, have a structure in your days, and nobody will be able to stop you from getting what you want.
Until next time, keep designing your epic life.
