“What Advice Do You Have for Creating Good Habits?”
How can you create successful habits to help your business or career or goals?
So, there are a bunch of books and programs and recommendations on how to create habits, but they all come back to one key element, action!
I’ve read about the power of 7, that after seeing something 7 times you’ll basically remember it forever, or that it’s the tipping point in marketing and you are more likely to take action on a product or service or a purchase.
Fact is, if you need to get into a routine, be it reading more regularly, going to the gym or exercising, or anything really, action is the key.
Something over nothing. It’s as simple as that.
For me and for many people who have their own business, it could be finding the time and creating the routine of posting online or creating videos just like this one.
I almost always have 1 or 2 videos in the hopper or an idea that I’m ready to roll on.
Sometimes I may have an entire script of things I want to say.
Sometimes it’s just a Post-It note stuck above my laptop camera on the wall above my desk.
Either way, I don’t have a shortage of ideas or things to talk about, it’s simply a matter of shifting my focus into action and turning on the camera.
I did a video a while back about how long it used to take me to do a 5 minute video. I’d write it all out, I would perfect it, I would practice, I would record, I would edit, I would rerecord, I would edit it again.
By the time the video was polished, transcribed and uploaded, a 5 minute video was taking me 2 or 3 hours!
A couple years later, I’m now at the point where I just turn on my camera and I bang out a video with 3 bullet points on a Post-It note, and now a 5 minute video takes a little more than 5 minutes.
Granted there is still some editing, usually I clip the first and last 3 or 4 seconds. I still upload the video to a transcription service.
I use ClipScribe currently, it gives me these lines of text right here. But once that platform has finished and the video is done and ready to roll, all in probably a 5 minute video realistically takes about 15 minutes end to end, down from almost 3 hours.
So, overcoming the uncomfortableness of:
- A) recording yourself on your phone or computer, sometimes holding your phone up in front of your face again and again, or even recording yourself in a public setting.
- B) seeing and hearing yourself, again and again in video format, can be a little awkward.
- C) I think it’s the constant critiquing of what you could have done better or should have said differently or simply the number of takes, where you may have forgotten what you were going to stay completely, so now you feel like a dummy and scrap the whole idea. I’ve done it.
These were all of my own hurdles and sometimes still are in a way. You never get entirely comfortable seeing or hearing yourself again and again as far as I’m concerned, but it’s something that you learn to live with no doubt.
Take action. Baby steps. Something is better than nothing, every single time.
