Do This To Align Your Habits with Your Life Goals
Today, we will review how to align habits and life goals to advance on your path toward your purpose.
Let’s get real for a second.
Understanding that you have a purpose in life is both inspiring and overwhelming, given the effort required to embark on that journey, particularly if you're unsure of where to begin.
In previous articles, we delved into methods for understanding your purpose or, at the very least, gaining clarity on what brings you joy in life and the reasons behind it.
But the phase that comes immediately after is the most important of all: TAKING ACTION.
....
Really quick: there are actually 3 ways to enjoy this article:
1. Watch this YouTube video:
Listen to this episode of the You Are All You Need podcast (available on any podcast streaming service)
3. Continue reading this article :)
....
This phase is fundamental in your journey toward personal evolution because it charts the path toward a deeper understanding of the most appropriate direction to fulfill your life's purpose.
You can spend time theorizing about your life's purpose, considering the myriad possibilities and challenges you might face in an attempt to predict the future.
This is a natural function of our analytical mind, always working to ensure our safety by seeking security and certainty about the path ahead.
However, this approach will not actively propel you toward your purpose.
Going over it again and again in our mind creates a constant loop of thoughts that generate more doubts and even block us, rather than help us to gain more clarity.
The key is to balance both thought and action. It is important to gain mental clarity of where you want to go, but at the same time, there comes a point when it requires your active implication through constant action-taking to move in the direction you want to go.
By taking real and continuous action to achieve a goal, you acquire an intelligence that thinking alone cannot give you.
In this way, by gaining experience on the physical plane and learning about it, it is through each step you take that you start to better understand who your inner self is and what your purpose is.
Once you are clear about the direction you want to move your life in -even if you do not yet know exactly what your purpose is- the next step is to start introducing actions into your daily life that support this vision.
The most effective way to do this is to use the great power of habits.
Habits are automatic, unconscious patterns of behavior that define and shape your life as a human being.
So much so, that the quality of your life is a direct reflection of the quality of your daily habits.
You are what you continuously do, for better or worse.
Habits control your life without you even realizing it because your brain turns them into acquired behavioral patterns at a certain moment and perfects those new neural pathways in order to maximize their functioning and energy.
That is why when you have a long-established habit, it does not require any additional effort to do it and quite often you do not even know that you are doing it.
When you have maintained a habit for a long period, it becomes so closely linked to your way of being and how you see life that it ends up defining you.
For example, you might identify as a morning person because you've established the habit of waking up at 5 am every day, or consider yourself sporty and fit due to your routine of exercising for half an hour daily.
Similarly, you may see yourself as a positive person because you actively and daily cultivate these types of thoughts, or view yourself as assertive because you always speak with confidence and determination, and so on.
Obviously, if the acquired habits are negative, the same thing happens, with the difference being that instead of elevating your life, they will diminish its quality day by day.
All personal growth and development processes only really work and are sustained when they are consistently performed on a daily basis.
In other words, when habits are implemented to ensure constant progress, or deliberate practice, towards those objectives.
Personally, one of the simplest and most effective ways I have found to start walking in the direction that you want your life to go in, is to gradually introduce simple and small habits into your daily routine that do not entail a great effort at first but which slowly begin to mark a before and after in the quality of your life.
For example, if one of the changes you want to make is to do more physical exercise to lose a few pounds and have a bit more energy but you have almost never done exercise and it is hard for you just to think about having to start sweating and running, lifting weights, etcetera.
You can simply start by introducing a 20-minute morning walk into your routine, walking briskly.
By putting on your headphones and listening to your favorite music or podcasts, you can make this walking time something you actually look forward to and are eager to do.
In this way, if you repeat this walk for 30 days in a row, you will be progressively introducing into your life the habit of getting out of the house in the morning to get your body moving and doing something you like and makes you feel good.
The next step will be perhaps to introduce about 5 or 10 minutes of running at your own pace into the time you set aside for walking.
Gradually, you can increase the intensity until perhaps that morning routine of getting your body moving for 20 or 30 minutes becomes the time you specifically go out to run and exercise.
This not only injects more vibrational energy into your day but also helps keep you in shape and shed those extra pounds.
There are a thousand ways to start introducing habits into your life, but in my case, this technique I just described helped me get back to my weight after my two pregnancies and has also become the daily time slot I dedicate to my physical and mental self-care.
I run for 10 minutes listening to my favorite music, do fitness yoga for about 30 to 40 minutes outdoors and meditate for 5 minutes at the end.
Like many women, being a mother of two young children and also an entrepreneur, finding this time for yourself is always difficult.
However, I have seen firsthand that if you make this commitment to yourself and establish that this daily half hour or hour a day is only and exclusively for you, it has a ripple effect on all other areas of your life because you raise your vibrational energy and give off more energy and vitality in everything you do.
It is from this state that you begin to attract everything that has the same vibration into your life, elevating your life continuously and progressively.
The most powerful combination of human behavior emerges when you achieve total synergy between the goals you set for yourself and the habits you put in place to reach those goals.
When this happens, there is a constant and intentional movement in your life toward the desired direction in which your goals and your habits seamlessly intertwine.
Goals and habits are two key pieces in the process of personal growth because goals force you to visualize the future you want and habits become those real daily steps you take to walk in that direction.
Such is the bond between the two that if you were to analyze the habits that are already a part of you and recall how they started, you will most likely find they did so by setting a specific goal.
In my case, years ago, I set a goal to improve my physical endurance and participate in several 10k races.
I achieved this goal and what has remained is the habit of running a few minutes each day. Since then it has been a fundamental part of my morning routine because it elevates my vibrational state and gives me energy to start the day.
So, let me ask you a question: what is more important, achieving a change or living with it? The answer is both!
You want to achieve changes in your life by setting clear goals, but
you also want to maintain them and live with a higher quality of life that brings you increasingly closer to your purpose, through the daily habits that you acquire.
Goals serve to create good habits and, in turn, good habits are key to meeting your goals. Therefore, a very useful technique for achieving changes and maintaining them over time is to use the great power of these two elements in unison and set goals to be achieved to control and improve daily habits.
...
Ready To Upgrade?
➡️ If you enjoyed this article, you’ll find a much deeper analysis on how to start living a life full of passion and purpose in my book You Are Already Everything You Need
➡️ Click here to download the first four episodes of my book for free
➡️ Join the 20-Day Challenge in my podcast You Are All You Need and start walking together this journey of self-transformation
Alicia Carrasco
Mom, entrepreneur, author
I left my job as a teacher in 2015 to start an online education company with my husband that nowadays has over 8,000 students with a turnover of seven figures. I want to share with you how to achieve your best self.
Do This To Align Your Habits with Your Life Goals
Today, we will review how to align habits and life goals to advance on your path toward your purpose.
Let’s get real for a second.
Understanding that you have a purpose in life is both inspiring and overwhelming, given the effort required to embark on that journey, particularly if you're unsure of where to begin.
In previous articles, we delved into methods for understanding your purpose or, at the very least, gaining clarity on what brings you joy in life and the reasons behind it.
But the phase that comes immediately after is the most important of all: TAKING ACTION.
....
Really quick: there are actually 3 ways to enjoy this article:
1. Watch this YouTube video:
Listen to this episode of the You Are All You Need podcast (available on any podcast streaming service)
3. Continue reading this article :)
....
This phase is fundamental in your journey toward personal evolution because it charts the path toward a deeper understanding of the most appropriate direction to fulfill your life's purpose.
You can spend time theorizing about your life's purpose, considering the myriad possibilities and challenges you might face in an attempt to predict the future.
This is a natural function of our analytical mind, always working to ensure our safety by seeking security and certainty about the path ahead.
However, this approach will not actively propel you toward your purpose.
Going over it again and again in our mind creates a constant loop of thoughts that generate more doubts and even block us, rather than help us to gain more clarity.
The key is to balance both thought and action. It is important to gain mental clarity of where you want to go, but at the same time, there comes a point when it requires your active implication through constant action-taking to move in the direction you want to go.
By taking real and continuous action to achieve a goal, you acquire an intelligence that thinking alone cannot give you.
In this way, by gaining experience on the physical plane and learning about it, it is through each step you take that you start to better understand who your inner self is and what your purpose is.
Once you are clear about the direction you want to move your life in -even if you do not yet know exactly what your purpose is- the next step is to start introducing actions into your daily life that support this vision.
The most effective way to do this is to use the great power of habits.
Habits are automatic, unconscious patterns of behavior that define and shape your life as a human being.
So much so, that the quality of your life is a direct reflection of the quality of your daily habits.
You are what you continuously do, for better or worse.
Habits control your life without you even realizing it because your brain turns them into acquired behavioral patterns at a certain moment and perfects those new neural pathways in order to maximize their functioning and energy.
That is why when you have a long-established habit, it does not require any additional effort to do it and quite often you do not even know that you are doing it.
When you have maintained a habit for a long period, it becomes so closely linked to your way of being and how you see life that it ends up defining you.
For example, you might identify as a morning person because you've established the habit of waking up at 5 am every day, or consider yourself sporty and fit due to your routine of exercising for half an hour daily.
Similarly, you may see yourself as a positive person because you actively and daily cultivate these types of thoughts, or view yourself as assertive because you always speak with confidence and determination, and so on.
Obviously, if the acquired habits are negative, the same thing happens, with the difference being that instead of elevating your life, they will diminish its quality day by day.
All personal growth and development processes only really work and are sustained when they are consistently performed on a daily basis.
In other words, when habits are implemented to ensure constant progress, or deliberate practice, towards those objectives.
Personally, one of the simplest and most effective ways I have found to start walking in the direction that you want your life to go in, is to gradually introduce simple and small habits into your daily routine that do not entail a great effort at first but which slowly begin to mark a before and after in the quality of your life.
For example, if one of the changes you want to make is to do more physical exercise to lose a few pounds and have a bit more energy but you have almost never done exercise and it is hard for you just to think about having to start sweating and running, lifting weights, etcetera.
You can simply start by introducing a 20-minute morning walk into your routine, walking briskly.
By putting on your headphones and listening to your favorite music or podcasts, you can make this walking time something you actually look forward to and are eager to do.
In this way, if you repeat this walk for 30 days in a row, you will be progressively introducing into your life the habit of getting out of the house in the morning to get your body moving and doing something you like and makes you feel good.
The next step will be perhaps to introduce about 5 or 10 minutes of running at your own pace into the time you set aside for walking.
Gradually, you can increase the intensity until perhaps that morning routine of getting your body moving for 20 or 30 minutes becomes the time you specifically go out to run and exercise.
This not only injects more vibrational energy into your day but also helps keep you in shape and shed those extra pounds.
There are a thousand ways to start introducing habits into your life, but in my case, this technique I just described helped me get back to my weight after my two pregnancies and has also become the daily time slot I dedicate to my physical and mental self-care.
I run for 10 minutes listening to my favorite music, do fitness yoga for about 30 to 40 minutes outdoors and meditate for 5 minutes at the end.
Like many women, being a mother of two young children and also an entrepreneur, finding this time for yourself is always difficult.
However, I have seen firsthand that if you make this commitment to yourself and establish that this daily half hour or hour a day is only and exclusively for you, it has a ripple effect on all other areas of your life because you raise your vibrational energy and give off more energy and vitality in everything you do.
It is from this state that you begin to attract everything that has the same vibration into your life, elevating your life continuously and progressively.
The most powerful combination of human behavior emerges when you achieve total synergy between the goals you set for yourself and the habits you put in place to reach those goals.
When this happens, there is a constant and intentional movement in your life toward the desired direction in which your goals and your habits seamlessly intertwine.
Goals and habits are two key pieces in the process of personal growth because goals force you to visualize the future you want and habits become those real daily steps you take to walk in that direction.
Such is the bond between the two that if you were to analyze the habits that are already a part of you and recall how they started, you will most likely find they did so by setting a specific goal.
In my case, years ago, I set a goal to improve my physical endurance and participate in several 10k races.
I achieved this goal and what has remained is the habit of running a few minutes each day. Since then it has been a fundamental part of my morning routine because it elevates my vibrational state and gives me energy to start the day.
So, let me ask you a question: what is more important, achieving a change or living with it? The answer is both!
You want to achieve changes in your life by setting clear goals, but
you also want to maintain them and live with a higher quality of life that brings you increasingly closer to your purpose, through the daily habits that you acquire.
Goals serve to create good habits and, in turn, good habits are key to meeting your goals. Therefore, a very useful technique for achieving changes and maintaining them over time is to use the great power of these two elements in unison and set goals to be achieved to control and improve daily habits.
...
Ready To Upgrade?
➡️ If you enjoyed this article, you’ll find a much deeper analysis on how to start living a life full of passion and purpose in my book You Are Already Everything You Need
➡️ Click here to download the first four episodes of my book for free
➡️ Join the 20-Day Challenge in my podcast You Are All You Need and start walking together this journey of self-transformation
