How Our Habits Affect Our Goals

How Our Habits Affect Our Goals

Hey guys, welcome back to the channel. It’s your boy, Sean Si, and I hope you guys are doing well.

This episode, we are going to be talking about habits. I know it’s a bit late because the New Year has already passed, but hey, New Year has caught us in a pretty bad light, right?

So a lot of people got COVID. I don’t know about you from where you are watching, but here in Metro Manila at least, so many people got the virus. And it seems like everything just went to a screeching halt, just like when the pandemic first hit way back 2020

The reason why I want to talk with you about habits is I personally underwent a major habit change and I want to share that with you today.

So habits. Habits are the things that we are on the trajectory that we want to be in.

One good example is an airplane. If an airplane takes off from one airport and is heading to another airport. Point A – Point B. If the trajectory of the plane is one degree off, it will end up in a whole different city or maybe even a whole different country rather than ending up in its destination.

A one degree difference can mean a whole new destination. You see, everyone wants to hit the goals that we put in place. All sports teams want to win the championship, but how come only one gets to win and everyone else loses? It’s because of the habits that we build.

We all have similar goals. You and I, we have similar goals. We want to be healthy. We want to be financially secure. We want to have a successful network. We want to be seen as a success in our circle of friends. We want to be seen as healthy, but how come for so many of us, that is not the case?

The secret to that is your habits, my habits. We have differing habits. How you get to a goal depends on your habits. James Clear says in his book Atomic Habits that, “We don’t rise to the level of our goals. We actually fall to the level of our systems.” That is how important systems are for you and me, and our systems are our habits.

So I want to tell you a story about my bad habits. I’m a guy who sleeps late. Now, I’m not saying for those of you night owls that that is wrong or a bad thing, but for me I know it was not healthy for me. So for me I know that was not the right habit to be having.

And I’ve always had the goal of waking up early, doing things early and being ahead of everyone else in my business. But I have a lot of bad habits that prevent me from doing so.

Namely, I am someone who is a workaholic, so that is not helping me at all. I work long hours and I’m addicted to just finishing tasks and work and just going on and on and on. And that is not good because you should only prioritize what pieces of work you should finish per day. You don’t need to do it all every darn day. And that is a bad habit of mine.

On top of that I would have the bad habit of eating late. So I would eat at 8PM, 9PM. On rare occasions I would eat at 10 PM. That gave me the unnatural energy for me to miss being sleepy at the right time or at the time that I wanted to sleep.

To make things worse, my entertainment or winding down or leisure time was after working hours. And because I was a workaholic, my after working hours would sometimes be at 8PM or 9PM and I would wind down then.

And my winding down, was playing computer games with my siblings, with some friends. And because I usually play community games, meaning there are a lot of people involved, a lot of players involved. I would also get into the bad habit of getting into another game if they want to play more. And that would just snowball into me sleeping at 12PM, or 1AM and 2AM, and sometimes on very rare occasions I would sleep at 3AM. That’s super unhealthy and I would beat myself up for that the next day.

I would also miss having extended hours with my wife, just talking with her and building a better marriage with her. And I would also miss some time spending with my sons and with my newborn baby girl as well.

So those bad habits compounded an unhealthy lifestyle. And plus the fact that I miss exercise on some days and I’m not really a vegan or vegetarian, or I don’t really choose my food that well compared to a lot of other people, that has contributed to my health degrading in the last quarter of last year and I really felt that.

I felt that there was something wrong with my body. There was something wrong with my health. So the first or second week of December I tried to turn things around, and that was the time that I finally said enough is enough, and I’m going to change the habit today.

So now that I’ve given you some introductions to my bad habits, what I want to do now is dive a little bit into some of the good habits that I’ve built, because if you want to get rid of bad habits, you have to replace it with something else. It can’t be hollow, and so what I did was I replaced it with what I considered to be good habits.

And the first thing that I did was make sure that I was asleep by a certain time. And for me to be able to do that, I had to eliminate my overtime working hours. So I would make sure that I would stop working by 6PM, 6:30PM at the latest. I should have had everything wrapped up by 6:30PM.

And then I would not do any more wind down activities, so I would not play computer games anymore. I was able to eliminate that. True, I haven’t been able to play or bond with my siblings or my friends like I used to, but I found out that the trade-off was much better.

Always remember, life is a series of trades and you got to make the right trades so that you can be able to achieve your desired future or your goals. And so I made this trade and what happened was I have more time now with my kids and my wife, which is very precious to me, and at the same time I was able to stick way better to my sleep routine.

So the first thing that I make sure of is, by a certain time at night, I am not exposed to blue lights anymore. So in my room I installed yellow lights for my lighting and it’s ambient. It’s good for giving you that nocturnal feel, and so my brain is not being signaled that I should keep awake.

Another thing that I do is I make sure to diffuse essential oils. You may believe it or not, but it works for me. And the essential oil that I specifically use every night is lavender. You may want to mix something else with that, but that is the stuff that helps me to get to sleep.

Another thing that I make sure to do is to make sure that my ambient sounds are turned on. You could use whatever you want. I think Spotify has a theta ambient music 6 Hz. You may want to try that out. That’s usually what you can use to relax. You listen to 6 Hz music and you play it in repeat mode all the way until you wake up.

And the last thing I make sure of is no cellphone. I think that cellphones or smartphones are practically the main culprit in the insomnia and depression and anxiety that we are all feeling today. Mix that up with caffeine and over consumption of coffee, you got a depressed and anxious generation. I think that’s what’s happening with the world today.

If you want to be less anxious, less stressed, less depressed maybe, and you want to have better quality sleep, you’ve got to lessen your caffeine intake for sure, and you have to have a good sleeping routine. You have to make sure that you put the phone down. By 8:00 PM, by 8:30PM, no more phone. Put it on airplane mode and put it on do not disturb mode. That works for me.

So that’s my sleep routine now. And 100%, that works. Actually, if I want to force myself to sleep by 8PM, I can’t because of that sleep routine. Okay, now that we’re done discussing my night or sleeping routine, my wind down routine, I just want to dive a little bit into my morning routine or my waking routine, because this one dictates the tempo of my entire day. And your waking up habits will dictate how productive and focused your day will be.

Remember that our episode is about productivity and focus. The first thing that I do when I wake up, I pray. I thank God I’m alive. I thank God for the day and I ask for His blessing for the day.

The second thing that I do is I prepare to go for a thirty-minute walk. You can do a ten-minute walk minimum, you can do 30 minutes. It doesn’t matter so long as you’re seeing and hearing the wind and you’re seeing forward momentum. Because when you are moving and you are walking forward, your eyes in its peripheral sees that you’re moving forward and things are passing you by, that sets your mind in a positive forward momentum so that you are better equipped to tackle the day.

So after my 30 minute walk, I go for a bath and/or I exercise. I burn calories, and that also helps me get more clarity in my head. After that I usually meditate. So I put on my noise canceling headset and I put on 40 Hz gamma waves and I listen to them and then picture what my desired future is like, what I want to achieve in the future.

And you can also envision during that time what you want to happen to your business, what you want to happen to your team, what you want to impart to your executives, your managers, your leaders. That helps you think about your business, so that when you start working, you work on your business rather than in your business.

And notice I drink coffee but I haven’t mentioned anything about coffee yet. Because I don’t drink coffee first thing in the morning. I drink it at, in my opinion, the perfect time, which is before lunch time. Because when I do my morning walk and my exercise, my body is pumped up, endorphins are being pumped by my brain and I am able to focus well. I am alert, I am not sleepy. So what use is drinking coffee during that time?

But come 11AM all the way to 12 noon or 1PM, that may be the time when my brain is slowing down. So that is actually the time that I drink my coffee. So it’s not a morning coffee, it’s more of an afternoon coffee and I drink cold brew so that I don’t get hungry and my body’s not too acidic.

Again, these are things that I’m just sharing with you, because you might want to adopt this for your own routine. I’m not saying this is the perfect routine for you. It really depends. You do you, I do me. I’m just sharing this so that you may get some good ideas and value out of it.

The last thing that I do in my mornings is, I make sure in the first hour or first two hours of my work is, I create. I don’t react. That is the time that I used to write. And the reason behind that is if you react, meaning you just check your messages, your email inbox, your Viber chats, your WhatsApp chats, whatever it is that you’re checking and you’re going to be reacting to those things, that is going to set the tempo for the rest of your day and the creative process is smashed. There is almost no way that you can create as well as you could in the first few hours of your work. That’s why I protect the first two hours of my work for creating.

I’ve shared with you what I personally do, what I personally know, some habits that I practiced today. And I hope that that helps you get some ideas on what you also can do or can improve.

Remember, you don’t need to copy what it is I’m doing. You can do your own thing and that can work for you. I’m only sharing this with you because I want you to know this helped me become more productive and more focused with my day. And for an entrepreneur, for a leader, that is a very big deal.

Not sure if you noticed, but this is a leadership stack shirt as well. If you are interested in getting one, please head over to our shop. We’ll put the link somewhere in this video and you can get this t-shirt shipped right over to your doorstep.

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And yeah, that’s it, guys. I hope you enjoy this episode and I’ll see you on the next one.