LifeChanger Success Program Session 6 Power Boost 
Summary of Session 6 – Develop life-enhancing habits
Small changes in course lead to vastly different destinations over time.
There are three approaches to habit change:
The level of Outcomes (what outcome you want)
The level of Processes (what new habits you want)
The level of Identity (who you want to become as a person)
Changing habits using a change in identity – the most powerful way.
Your Identity is formed by the beliefs you have about yourself, your philosophies, values, judgments, self-image. Forming new habits and having them stay with you long-term, is a result of one single decision… The decision to upgrade your Identity!
E.g. “I just don’t do that anymore, it’s no longer part of my Identity“
E.g. smoking “I’m a non-smoker” (I just used to have the occasional cigarette in the past, but I don’t do that anymore)
- Who do you want to become as a person?
- What is your Future Identity?
Who is [your name] at the end of this program? - Once you’ve changed your identity to this new person, who doesn’t have the bad habit and who does have the life-enhancing habit, you’ll not fall back to the old habits again.
Releasing previous “bad habits”
It’s very hard to stop doing a bad habit. You’ve probably tried to stop doing something before and most likely failed e.g. stop smoking, stop eating unhealthy food, etc. When you focus on the bad habit in order to stop it, you end up doing it more.
You can, however, replace the bad habit with a more empowering good habit and put all your focus in this regard on the new life-enhancing habit, such as eating healthy food (instead of unhealthy food), drinking water (instead of soda), doing exercise or yoga (instead of watching television), caring for your fingernails (instead of biting them).
Avoiding bad habits by noticing triggers
Avoid the triggers where possible but, if they must be there, make a decision ahead of time to avoid making a decision in the moment.
Establishing a new habit
Making an empowering behavior into a habit makes doing this behavior consistently almost effortless.
First 15 days hard, Next 15 days “messy” (e.g. wondering why you’re doing this)
After 33 days, it’s easy to continue, but you must continue for 66 days to make it an actual habit that you can continue long term with very little effort because it’s just something you always do.
STAGING HABITS
Note that “staging habits” is a great way to make real progress.
Staging habits means that you start one or two habits and, when they get easier on day 33, you can add the next habit. Try scheduling when you’ll add in the next empowering habit on your list up front, so you won’t forget to add it later.
Here’s your Homeplay:
1
Change behaviors
Select some behaviors that you’d like to change or to make a habit and put them in the order you want to develop them in. Being patient is the best way to get them all to stick. Start with something easy, or something important enough that your “Why” will make it happen.
2
Create a habit
Create it as a habit in the LifeChanger app.
(bottom right corner yellow + button, select Habit, put it on your calendar into either a productivity zone or (especially if it will take a time slot to do it, e.g. going to the gym) schedule it into a particular time each day.
If there are a group of activities that fit well together, you can make them into one habit (e.g. a morning routine).
Note that you will start collecting a high score if you mark the habit as Done (either by double-clicking on it in the calendar, or marking it as done in “Review the Day” accessed through the blue menu on the left side of the page in the web-app and the menu at the bottom of the page in the smart phone app).
3
Journaling
This is a good time to also look at the “Review the Day” part of the LifeChanger app, since journaling is a great way to celebrate your wins.
4
Morning Routine
Consider establishing a “morning routine” similar to that of highly successful people. The more of these things you add to your routine the better, but if they seem too much, add them gradually or selectively.
- Wake up at 5am – Try a 10 day challenge of doing this every day for just 10 days. You may surprise yourself how easy and productive it is in that time so you don’t want to change when the 10 days are up.
- Have a glass of water on waking.
- Have a cold shower (to really wake up).
- Consider all the things you’re grateful for. Write them down or watch Daily Inspiration.
- Consider all the things you’re good at (resources)
- Consider your visons for your ideal future and imagine them achieved already – Who am I when this ideal condition has been reached?
- Do some movement (exercise or yoga)
5
The Forgiveness exercise
Related to habits is carrying around baggage from past wrongs that we feel have been done to us by other people. We blame them, but forget to take responsibility for our response to what they’ve done. This weighs us down and makes us feel bad. When we think of what they did to us, it’s like experiencing the trauma all over again and this makes it hard for us to move on. Replaying the trauma is like a habit, that makes us suffer the wrong again and again.
The cure for this is Forgiveness. Forgiveness does not mean that we condone what the wrongdoer has done. We’re not forgiving them for their sake but for our own freedom from suffering from the wrong that was done to us in the past. However, the most effective way of freeing ourselves from the trauma is to fully forgive the wrongdoer.
Choose an incident from the past that you’re holding a grudge about. Start with something of medium importance to you to practice with, not something so traumatic that you don’t think you could ever forgive the person. But, after practicing and experiencing the freedom that you’re rewarded with on some less traumatic events, you’ll eventually be able to use the technique on serious events.
- Close your eyes and imagine the wrong-doer in the room with you.
- Think about what they did that upset you.
- Tell them that you forgive them, and try to really mean it.
- See if there’s anything else that that same wrong-doer has done to upset you and forgive them for that as well, or move on to another separate incident and forgive that person also.
- Keep going as long as you’re finding it OK to forgive but not so long that you’re just dwelling on the things that upset you.
- Finally, think of something that you’ve done that you’re not pleased with and FORGIVE YOURSELF.
If you really do this part of the homework, I and others should be able to see a visible difference in the way you show up to life. Please give it a try.
