Pay Attention to What You’re Thinking About | Tom Hopkins’ Sales Training Blog

Pay Attention to What You’re Thinking About

Rarely do people choose the details of their futures. They choose their daily habits and those daily habits dictate their futures. Re-read those first two sentences several times. Then, think about your daily habits. How are they dictating your life?

Are you often rushing in the morning because you oversleep?

Is it a part of your routine to search for your mobile phone or keys every time you leave the house?

Do you travel through rush hour traffic every day with a sour attitude?

During time you plan to work, are you daydreaming about what you’d rather be doing?

Do you grab just anything for lunch?

Do you catch yourself watching the clock the last 5 to 20 minutes of your work day?

How do you spend your evenings?

How well do you sleep?

Those basic aspects are part of everyone’s day. It’s easy to fall into habits that may not be good for us. Why is that? Because we don’t give much conscious thought to them. This is so typical of nearly everyone on the planet. We get up. We follow the same routine for getting out the door in the morning. We drive the same roads to get there. We work. We watch the time. We drive the same roads home in the evening and spend our evenings pretty much the same way.

Think about just one aspect of your typical day that you would change if you could. Would you like a smoother start to your day? Could you have it if you woke up just 10 to 15 minutes earlier? Could something as simple as having a key hook or basket to hold your keys and your phone put an end to a daily search for those items once you developed the habit of using it?

This may sound super-simplified, but the first two sentences of this article are very true. So, if you want your future to be different from the present, don’t sweat over large goals and planning—at least not today. Today, pay attention to your habits. Pick one that could be holding you back or slowing down any progress you’d like to make toward improving your life. Determine what you could do differently. Stick with something simple and give it a try for a few days. If it seems to be helping, make a conscious effort for about three weeks to make it a daily habit. Once it’s a positive habit, and you’re reaping the rewards of a more relaxed start to your day or whatever habit you choose, you can forget about it and move on to something else.

As with much of life and business, it truly is the little things that make the difference. Here are some other ideas to counter the typical daily stressors of adult working life:

If you must travel during rush hour, stop stressing over it. Accept that it will be what it is. Th

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