You Play to Win the Game - Leadership Lessons Westside Toastmasters, in Santa Monica
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Habits Form Who You Are, So Form Good Habits

First you form your habits, and then your habits form you. Whether you are becoming better or worse depends on what you do. Good habits and bad habits are the same. You've always got to check yourself on things, to say, 'What did I do today, good and bad, that I did yesterday?' Sometimes you don't know. Sometimes things you repeat are bad. But you don't know it because you say, 'It's just me.' Sometimes I'll say something to somebody, and I'll say, 'Why'd I say that? What was I thinking?' Then I do it two days in a row, and now I've got to fix it. I've got to apologize. It's easy to repeat things and before you know it they become who you are.

With the good things, that's a good thing. If you decide you want to run every day and it becomes a habit, then it's something that just gets done. It has to get done. You don't even think about it. It just gets done.

With the bad things, it's bad. Say you drink six beers and eat chips every night, and you do this again and again, and you start putting on weight, and you can't figure out why; well, look at the habit. Look at what you're doing.

You need to ask yourself, 'What are you aspiring to become? What do you want?' Always look at yourself and say that the things you do in the dark will come to the light. If you've got to do them in the dark, what you're really saying is that you don't want them to come to the light. You should be able to do everything in the light. And if you want to change, you must deprogram yourself from the way you did things in the past and put yourself in a position to succeed.

My players fall into bad habits all the time. Maybe their footwork gets sloppy, or they start too low or too high. When I recognize it, we get them to practice the correction over and over and over until it's second nature. It's boring, but you need to get that habit corrected to the point where you don't think about it.


You Play to Win the Game - Leadership Lessons Westside Toastmasters, in Santa Monica
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