Summary: Managing Your Habits for Success: How to Improve at Work and in Life by Paying Attention to Your Habits by Danny Zelaya

• Habits are powerful forces that shape our lives. They can either help us or hinder us, depending on whether they are good or bad. In this article, we will summarize and review the book Managing Your Habits for Success: How to Improve at Work and in Life by Paying Attention to Your Habits by Danny Zelaya, which shows you how to change your habits for the better.
• If you are interested in learning more about how to manage your habits for success, and how to improve at work and in life by paying attention to your habits, then you should read the book Managing Your Habits for Success: How to Improve at Work and in Life by Paying Attention to Your Habits by Danny Zelaya.

Recommendation

What makes the difference between a successful career and one that stalls? Bank executive and Army chaplain Danny Zelaya believes the difference lies in your habits, even the unconscious ones so ingrained you barely notice them. In this quick read, Zelaya shows how to improve your professional performance by taking control of your habitual behaviors. He argues that developing awareness and control is worth the effort because some habits – such as interrupting other people or thinking negatively about yourself – can be professionally damaging. He demonstrates how to assess your habits, analyze their consequences and replace counterproductive habits with productive ones.

Take-Aways

• Leaders must manage themselves.
• Your habits reflect your beliefs about the world.
• Awareness is the first step in managing your habits.
• Identify your go-to responses and assess whether they help or hinder you.
• The final stage of your assessment is developing new practices.

Summary

Leaders must manage themselves.

Habits are behaviors people develop in response to situations they encounter repeatedly. Managing yourself requires observing and evaluating your everyday habits, analyzing whether they help or impede your progress toward your goals, and determining how to improve them.

“If you know what you repeatedly do, you can have more control over what you want to do.”

When your habits become ingrained, stimuli can trigger habitual responses without your conscious awareness. Instead of reacting without thinking, try to become aware of your habits so you can judge whether they help you or if you want to revisit them. Recognizing your habits enables you to change them.

Your habits reflect your beliefs about the world.

Your convictions – the ideas and concepts you accept as true – shape your attitudes and behavior. For example, if you think that working hard is essential to attaining something you want, such as a promotion, you are more likely to work hard.

“Your beliefs…give you consistent direction on what to do, what to expect and how to respond to life’s moments.”

Your assumptions derive from ideas and information you have gathered from your environment and other significant people in your life. The people who raised you probably influenced you the most, but you also draw principles from a wide range of social clusters, including your ethnic group, religious or spiritual community, co-workers, and friends. To know what you truly believe, you must distinguish whether the precepts you have derived reflect the world as it is or as your social groups have defined it.

These deeply held and reinforced practices shape your expectations of how events will unfold. For example, based on your knowledge of promotions, you expect that any promotion will include a raise in pay.

“Disagreeing with your environment can help change your mind, or it can strengthen your mind.”

As a machine performs a particular action when you press the appropriate button, you may have developed a preset response to certain stimuli. Perhaps when you feel bored you automatically scroll through social media on your phone. Or, when someone asks you to do something, you habitually say yes.

The way you habitually respond to a situation reflects your beliefs about it. However, if you find yourself in a similar situation repeatedly, eventually you won’t need to think about what to do. Your response will become a habit.

Problems can arise when you misinterpret a situation. For example, you may think you’re in familiar circumstances and so default to your habitual response. But you may have overlooked signals that indicate you’re encountering a different set of criteria where your old rules don’t apply. Problems also arise when your beliefs about the world are inaccurate. If you don’t have the facts about a situation, you are more likely to respond inappropriately.

If you believe that you are not as important as other people, you may habitually generate negative thoughts about yourself whenever you engage with other people, even very familiar people. As a result, you might not feel comfortable sharing your ideas in meetings, or you may steer clear of leadership opportunities. An inaccurate belief can trigger a habitual response, which in turn can produce a result that may not benefit you.

Awareness is the first step in managing your habits.

Your daily patterns may launch unconscious behaviors that you may not be able to separate from conscious ones without deliberate effort. Cultivating self-recognition of your beliefs and habits enables you to curtail your detrimental thought patterns. Because beliefs and habits correlate, observing one can provide insights into the other.

“By paying attention and taking responsibility for your habits, you can improve at virtually anything.”

Keep an eye out for things you do automatically in familiar situations, such as how you start your workday. Some of your habits are productive, and you can rely on them to move you toward your goals. Some are constraining. Entering your car is a familiar situation. You probably respond to it by automatically fastening your seat belt. That habit is beneficial because it supports your goal of staying safe.

Common habits to look out for include smoking or drinking when you feel stressed, interrupting people when they speak, and shifting the blame for poor results away from yourself. Sustaining your awareness of habitual negative behaviors can be difficult in a world full of distractions; it takes practice.

A business meeting proves a rich environment for diagnosing your habits. Take note of which colleague you pay the most attention to, which ones you decide to sit with and how you express disagreement.

“The causes of your habits are not as important as becoming self-aware of them and then making a decision to keep or change them.”

In a group situation, most people subconsciously mirror other people’s actions and ideas. This happens, for example, when someone in a group yawns, and everyone else feels the urge to yawn. Train yourself to notice whenever you feel the inclination to adopt others’ ideas and actions. Rely on the phrase, “Let me think about this.” It will remind you to consider ideas before you accept them and to evaluate behaviors before you emulate them.

Monitor how you feel in a group situation. Unlike fleeting thoughts, emotions last long enough for you to recognize and analyze them. This will help you evaluate an idea objectively, rather than letting your sentiments or habits influence you. It will also help you notice when someone is attempting to sway your thinking by manipulating your feelings.

Identify your go-to responses and assess whether they help or hinder you.

Evaluate your practices in light of what you want to achieve. If your current patterns bring you what you want, you don’t need to change them. If you want to attain something different, recognize and modify any routines that might interfere with your larger objectives.

“Having a purpose for a habit does not mean it’s the best thing to do. It simply means it’s a choice you repeatedly make.”

As you evaluate your habits, keep in mind that some of them lead to positive outcomes. If an unconscious practice produces the results you want, do not change or eliminate it. But other habitual lapses, such as unfounded negative thoughts, are more clearly detrimental.

Other habits produce mixed results. For example, you may have started waking at 5 a.m. because you believe that productive people are early risers. Although you may be effective in those early hours, this new practice can produce side effects, such as fatigue and difficulty focusing, that may undermine your productivity throughout the day.

Leaders should watch out for another pitfall. When you hold a position of authority, acting on your beliefs without checking to be sure they’re accurate can become habitual. Instead, question your knowledge and assumptions, and welcome the viewpoints of team members who disagree with you about an idea or plan of action.

“Self-awareness is a mental pause.”

Give yourself the time and distance to examine your life, clarify your goals and values, and determine if your habits are contributing to what you want to achieve. You may need to find a way to step back temporarily from your day-to-day activities. Taking a break from your job is one way to gain the space to examine your unconscious assumptions. Stepping away from your usual group and meeting new people also can spark a fresh perspective about your normal practices.

To evaluate a habit, ask:

• Is this routine helping me achieve my goals?
• Does it accurately reflect reality?
• Do I consider this a good, bad or mixed practice?
• Is this habit in harmony with my values?
• Are there other approaches that would offer a better route to my goal?

The final stage of your assessment is developing new practices.

To develop a new way of responding, declare a specific goal. It should be something important because you must strongly desire the benefits in order to follow through. This obtainable wish creates a sense of purpose that you can draw from to sustain the process of forming a new habit.

To be as precise as you can about what you want to achieve, create a list of your top goals for the next six to twelve months.

Without this well-defined objective, you may fail to focus on your most relevant habits. If you want to improve your time management skills, for instance, identify the precise behaviors that interfere with making the most of your time. If one roadblock is habitually checking social media every time you pick up your phone, then generalized strategies, such as buying a day planner, will be less effective than the targeted action of setting a schedule for reviewing social media posts or even completely deleting your social media app.

If your purpose is to manage your money more effectively, you want to develop the necessary habits to reach that goal. Narrow your focus to a specific benefit of sound money management. If you like to travel, you could make taking more trips your highest goal. With this desirable, concrete idea in mind, you are more likely to adopt the habits that will help you save more money. Tie the habit of saving money to your ultimate goal, traveling, to ease the process of replacing a spending habit with a saving habit.

Keep your values in mind when you set targets. Using your values to set priorities can help you limit how many goals you set and select which ones are most important ones as your main focus. Set a manageable number of goals. Taking on too many can blur your focus.

“The opportunity to keep learning and improving is what brings energy, enthusiasm and excitement to each day.”

Determine the precise habits that are essential to meeting your mark. For example, habits that lead to saving more money include keeping a record of your “fixed” and “discretionary” spending, automatically depositing a certain percent of each paycheck in your savings account, and reducing your credit card use.

Cultivate a supportive and motivating environment. Join or form a group with people who have similar goals and interests. For example, if you want to develop the habit of taking walks, join a hiking group. Post reminders of your goal in your daily environment – perhaps in places you return to often, like your refrigerator – to encourage you to develop the requisite routines.

Make the preparations necessary for putting a proposed habit into practice. If your goal is to exercise daily, prepare by keeping your workout clothes clean and available, deciding which exercise is right for you, and determining the best time for exercising. Celebrate every win, even if you make only a small advance toward your goal. Record your progress, so you don’t forget those milestones along the way. Remember that you can’t control everything about your environment, so take steps to identify what you can control, and develop ways to shield yourself from demotivating or distracting hindrances.

Creating a new habit takes time and patience. If you get frustrated, remind yourself that it took many repetitions to ingrain your old practices. Don’t be upset if you fail to respond in a new way every time you think you should. The most important step is to keep repeating your new response continuously over time until it becomes automatic.

About the Author

Danny Zelaya, a Senior Vice President at a Fortune 500 bank, also serves as a chaplain in the California Army National Guard.

Genres

Self-help, Personal Development, Psychology, Habits, Productivity, Leadership, Business, Career, Health, Finance

Review

The book Managing Your Habits for Success: How to Improve at Work and in Life by Paying Attention to Your Habits by Danny Zelaya is a self-help guide that teaches you how to change your habits for the better. The author, who is an executive director at a Fortune 500 bank, shares his personal and professional experience of overcoming bad habits and developing good ones. He explains the science and psychology behind habits, and how they affect your thoughts, beliefs, and actions. He also provides practical tools and strategies to help you identify, modify, and replace your habits with ones that support your goals and values.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part covers the basics of habits, such as what they are, how they are formed, and why they are hard to change. The second part focuses on the role of beliefs in shaping and changing your habits, and how to use affirmations, visualization, and meditation to reinforce positive beliefs. The third part offers specific tips and techniques to change your habits in different areas of your life, such as work, health, relationships, and finances. The book also includes exercises, quizzes, and worksheets to help you apply what you learn and track your progress.

The book Managing Your Habits for Success: How to Improve at Work and in Life by Paying Attention to Your Habits by Danny Zelaya is a useful and inspiring resource for anyone who wants to improve their habits and achieve their potential. The author writes in a clear, conversational, and engaging style, and uses anecdotes, examples, and stories to illustrate his points. The book is well-organized, well-researched, and well-supported by scientific evidence and references. The book is not a one-size-fits-all solution, but a flexible and customizable approach that allows you to choose the habits that suit your personality, preferences, and situation. The book is not only informative, but also motivational and empowering. The author encourages you to take action, experiment, and learn from your mistakes. He also reminds you to celebrate your successes, reward yourself, and enjoy the process of changing your habits.

The book is not without its limitations, however. Some of the concepts and ideas may be familiar or repetitive to readers who have read other books or articles on habits, such as The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg or Atomic Habits by James Clear. Some of the exercises and worksheets may be tedious or time-consuming to complete, and may require a lot of commitment and discipline to follow through. Some of the tips and techniques may not work for everyone, depending on their circumstances and challenges. Some of the examples and stories may not be relatable or relevant to all readers, especially those from different cultures or backgrounds. The book may also benefit from more editing and proofreading, as there are some typos and grammatical errors throughout.