Enterprise

Quality habits key to business success this year and beyond

resolutions

Avoiding old bad habits that prevent one from achieving set goals helps us to achieve our New Year resolutions and move closer to attaining our lifelong dreams. Fotosearch

Every end of the year, individuals as well as organisations take time off to reflect on how the preceding year has been.

Some are not always satisfied with their achievements and make resolutions to change their ways of doing things in the New Year hoping that this would yield the desired results.

However, majority often backslide to the old habits before the first quarter of the year. This is because old habits die hard. They require more than just mere declarations to change. Behavioural psychologists tell us that our habits determine 95 per cent of our actions.

This implies that almost everything that you successfully achieve in your business next year and beyond will be determined by the quality of the habits that you form.

It is primarily by creating good habits and becoming a purpose-driven person that you can become successful both in business and personal life.

Napoleon Hill in his motivational book, Think and Grow Rich, lists desire or purpose as one of the key pillars of success in accumulation of wealth.

When you hit a crunch point in pursuit of whatever you resolve to achieve, your ability to stay focused and concentrate will depend on how badly you desire to achieve it, and this can make all the difference between success and failure.

Harmonising your habits with your goals and desires in life is the first step towards achievement. Making a list of the things you want to achieve is one of the most effective ways of internalising them so that they become part of your habits.

As it is said, if you ink it you think it. This means you must think on paper. Write anything that you would like to do on paper first then select the most important things.

Time is a precious and scarce commodity in our lives. It pays to prioritise our goals so that we can focus our daily actions towards achieving only few things that will have the biggest positive impact in our lives.

German artist and politician Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said, ‘‘the things that matter most must never be at the mercy of the things that matter least”.

Therefore, as you start the year ensure that you prioritise your time and resources so that you can begin with, and always focus on activities that have the greatest possible consequences for yourself and your business.

Doing minor things is a habit that must be replaced by doing things that matter every single day of your life. Start every day by asking yourself one question, if you have to do just five things for the day that would have the greatest returns on your business what will they be.

You will most likely find out that there are certain key things that will appear on your list every day. By consistently doing those things, you form a winning habit.

One of the most important prioritisation tools is to-do list. I adopted this simple act of starting my day by listing things what I intent to do and did it several times until it became a habit. The results were amazing.

This habit has helped me achieve so much this year that my 2013 resolution is to make sure before I sleep every day I write my to-do list for the following day. I will then review them every morning, and certainly will never start my day without a ‘to-do list.’

Mr Kiunga is the author of ‘Entrepreneurial Journey: From Employment to Business’ among other books. Email: [email protected]