Habits

Welcome back to Six Minutes and today’s idea is worth its weight in gold without question. Habits.

Good habits will give you results that stick. Bad habits will destroy everything. This is Bob Proctor and I’m going to be the first one to admit that I have some bad habits. That’s right; all my habits are not great, so if you’ve got some bad habits don’t feel bad so does your next-door neighbor. So does your mentor your coach. So does your mother and father if they’re alive. So does everyone. And the trick of life is to replace a bad habit with a good habit.

I used to hang around bars all the time. And one day I went in and I picked up a glass and I looked around and I thought, they’re all bums in here and then it dawned on me… I’m always here. I learned something. I put the glass down I said, “I’m never coming back here again and I’m never going to drink this and I never did.” And that was a long time ago.

But you know what I did? I went from spending all my money on the bar to the racetrack and I started to bet it all on horses. So I went from making somebody with a bar get wealthy and then I started to feed the horses and one day I woke up and I learned something. If you don’t consciously and deliberately replace a bad habit with a good habit you’ll automatically create another bad habit.

Now what is a habit? A habit is an idea that has been planted in the garden of your sub-conscience mind and then repetitively fed for a sufficient period of time that you act on it without giving any thought to it. I’ll give you an example. I want you to right now mentally imagine you’re pulling on your underwear in the morning. What foot do you put in first? I put my right foot in. If I tried to put my left foot in my underwear first I’d stagger and I’d fall over. And you say what’s this got to do with it, it’s got everything to do with it! Why do I put my right foot, you may put your left, certainly a lot of people do, well when I was just a little gaffer, didn’t have a clue of how to put underwear on, my mother or my grandmother or my father or somebody came along and they had the underwear out. Put your foot in here, your other foot. What did they do? They had the underwear prepared as if they were going to put it on, and so pretty soon I was doing it like they were doing it. They through repetition planted in my mind, well now think of this. You just don’t form habits of how to get dressed. You form habits to do everything that you do, and some of them are not that productive. Any idea that you keep dwelling on and impressing upon your sub-conscience mind becomes fixed in the sub-conscience mind. A habit is nothing but an idea that’s fixed in the subconscience mind that you act on without giving any conscience thought.

Many years ago, I went in to train the Prudential Insurance Company of America, their agents. I ended up training all of their agents and I only got them to do two things. This is in the early 70’s. I got them to form the habit of being in front of a prospect before 9am and ask everybody they talk to, to purchase $100,000 worth of insurance. I said you don’t have to sell them just give them the opportunity to say no. You know the sales in that company went up by 100’s of millions of dollars. I had a retired VP, tell me he thought it was a billion. Just changing two habits. What habit do you want to change?

I’m forever checking out habits I’ve got. I’m in the habit right now of changing my diet. And you know something I’ve been doing it for going on, three weeks, it’s getting easier but it’s still not that easy. I’d still like to reach over and eat some of that when nobody is looking. Doesn’t work, doesn’t work. I’m looking. What habit are you going to form and you shouldn’t try and form more than 2 at once, it’ll become too big and too heavy and you won’t form any. Make up your mind you’re going to do it every day, every day, every day. Until you don’t have to think about it and then you’ll automatically do it. I guarantee you. This idea will change your life think about it all day because that is definitely an idea that will give you Results that will Stick.

This is Bob Proctor and thank you.