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Dear Readers:

I have a terrible habit of watching too much TV. After a long, difficult day, I tend to come home, eat and spend the following three or four hours numbing my brain by what was once referred to as “the stupid box”. At one time, I thought, “If this is what it takes to escape a stressful day, then no harm done.” This all changed when I started to add up the time I was wasting. Those hours added up to nearly one day a week. That is over a month of valuable time I could be spending doing something much more creative.

Now, those of you who have been reading my blog for a while know that curbing my TV time is a hard habit to break. No stranger to addiction, I have a personality that tends to go from zero to out-of-control with certain things. Until I got sober in 1990, that was drugs and alcohol. That addiction was then replaced with desserts. Until I read this book for the first time last year,  I was not able to go a day without ice cream, cake, or some other type of pastry. This book led to a commitment so powerful that I did not even allow myself one taste of my own wedding cake because I knew that, in doing so, I would be inviting a detrimentally bad habit back into my life.

While I can now resist the cupcakes my staff bring one another into the office, the TV still seduces me, and with my mind on autopilot, I have found myself noshing on other types of junk food without thinking. Talk about frustrating! I decided to set myself up to beat this bad habit once and for all.  In the past two months, instead of sitting in front of a mindless show, I have chosen to read or write instead. At first, I found this challenge to be very difficult. This all changed when I came upon an amazing book titled: The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life and Business. I strongly recommend this book to any and all of you who would like to break a bad habit. In the past eight weeks, I have not only not watched TV, I have lost weight thanks to the lack of unconscious snacking. But the most powerful change is the presence I have been able to bring to my creative work.

Because I want to see all of you succeed in breaking your own bad habits, I would like to share a few tips from the book:

Reprogram Your Routine: The best way to change a bad habit is to replace it with a good one.

Be Consistent: It takes at least 21 days to change a bad habit. When you hit that 21st day, reward yourself with something positive.

Empowerment Leads To Success: The moment you empower yourself to change your bad habit, you will also be encouraged to change many other business practices you have neglected into better ones.

I share this personal story with all of you because we all have a bad habit that we promise ourselves that we will change at the beginning of a new year. I really believe this book can help all of you achieve success as it helped (and is helping) me. It’s not the first time I have attempted to curb the TV watching, but I won’t give up and I really hope it sticks this time.

I would love it if you would also allow yourselves to be open and vulnerable and share the one bad habit you would like to change. It can be something related to your personal or business life, or share a bad habit you have been successful in changing.

God Bless,

Preston

(Photo courtesy of The Book Company)

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