The Beginner's Guide To Building Good Habits

Here at Elite Jumps, we see ourselves as more than just a jump rope company.

We believe in doing hard things, and we believe in constantly pushing outside our comfort zones to become the best versions of ourselves.

To become that, we must start by building good habits. So, in this special article, we will be going through a beginner's guide to building good habits.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” ~ Aristotle

What Are Habits?

Habits are the building blocks of our lives.

Habits are extremely powerful. They're the building blocks that shape our future.

However, many people have trouble building the right habits to achieve their goals.

Our lives today are essentially the sum of our habits.

Many people are constantly looking for shortcuts or life hacks, but getting just 1% better every day with the right habits can change your life. This concept of making “tiny gains” by getting better every day was made popular by James Clear in his book Atomic Habits.

So, how do we build these good habits? Let’s dive right in.

Start Small

Keep your daily actions small. Strive to get 1% better every day.

Building small habits every day will help you in making a big future ahead.

Will Smith famously quoted, “Don’t set out to build a wall… Instead, lay a brick as perfectly as a brick can be laid… and soon you have a wall. Great feats are simply the outcome of tiny acts done well—over & over & over again.”

So start building small habits first.

Set Rewards

Enjoyable behaviors prompt our brains to release a chemical called dopamine, and a brain that keeps the dopamine flowing helps us reinforce the behaviors we want.

So when it comes to building good habits, it is crucial to choose actions and behaviors that feel rewarding, because the feeling of a positive experience gives you a reason to repeat the behavior again the next time.

Did you work out 3x this week? Treat yourself to a smoothie, a massage, or a movie. Did you follow your diet all week? Treat yourself to a new book, go to a new city, and get a facial. Follow up with even more good for the small wins.

Make It Easy

To be successful it is important to make good habits easy and bad habits impossible to indulge in. This can be achieved using the technique called the commitment device.

A commitment device refers to a choice that an individual makes in the present that controls their actions in the future. Think of it like locking in a future behavior.

For instance, if you want to avoid eating out, the best way is to forget your wallet at home. If you want to exercise on Sunday morning instead of watching Netflix all day, put your workout clothes next to the bed before you go to sleep and put the TV remote in another room. Starting to catch the drift?

By doing this, you’re taking willpower away from the equation.

Make It Attractive

Fun gets done.

Making a habit attractive is a great way to achieve our goal of making a habit stick.

If you study biographies, documentaries, and stories of the highest achievers in the world, they all have one thing in common: Pure love and obsession for what they do.

"The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.” ~ Steve Jobs

They’re infatuated with it. Obsessed with it.

It’s the thing they think about the minute they wake up til they go to sleep and then they dream about it. They will sacrifice anything to feed that love.

That’s the secret: Fall in love with what you do.

Once you do that, there’s no resistance to doing the work.

Because it becomes what you do by default.

Ditch Perfection

Give yourself grace.

When you have a “bad day” and you don’t do what you said you would do, don’t throw everything you’re working towards out the window. Brush yourself off.

Pick yourself back up and practice the new habit again the next day

The late, great, Kobe Bryant once said in an interview, “Failure doesn't exist. If I fail on Monday, I'm going to learn from it and get up and try again on Tuesday.”

Summary

This is how you build good habits.

1. Start Small
2. Set Rewards
3. Make It Easy
4. Make It Attractive
5. Check On Yourself

If you do these five things consistently, over time you will become one of those people who just stick to their good habits no matter what happens. Good habits no longer become something you do, good habits become who you are.

For more inspiration, tips, and tutorials, check us out on our YouTube channel.

You can also find us on Instagram and Facebook.

If you found this article inspiring and encouraging, you’ll love our Do Hard Things podcast where we talk with guests from all walks of life about the most difficult thing in their life they wouldn’t take back and how they grew - check it out here.