In the days to come, how can you assure that you're conquering and overcoming stress on a regular basis that you are practicing as a way of life, you stress versus distress. Now, this is so critical, because remember, we are creatures of habit. And unless you change your habit, you're going to fall back into the old routine. The Greek father said first we make our habits, and then our habits make us and that is so true. I want you to look at these words that are from the book The Power of Habit by Charles duhigg. It's a best selling book and it's one of the most authoritative books on habit formation as possible.

Look on your look at the slide here and look at these words. When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in a decision and the decision making. It stops working so hard or diverts focus to other tasks. So unless you deliberately find a habit, unless you find new routines, the pattern will unfold automatically. Do you get the point? If you have a bad habit, and do not deliberately choose to starve that habit, and feed a good new habit, then that old habit will come back over and over and over again.

Habits are incredibly difficult. There's a sense in which we don't conquer habits. We replace them because once you've by choice and by A bad habit, it gets harder and harder to extract yourself from it. So you need to be very intentional, very deliberate about developing new habits. And then look at this particular quotation. champions don't do extraordinary things.

They do ordinary things, but they do them without thinking too fast for the other team to react. They follow the habits they've learned. So champions, in sports and champions in life have learned to develop mental muscle memory. They've learned to practice something over and over and over again, until it becomes a natural habit, a way of life. And that's what I want you to do. So, in this session, I just want to give you five tips or five keys, on habit formation.

These are things that have worked for me and Thousands and thousands of people I've spoken to and event my coaching clients all around the world, and they work universally. They all begin with the letter P, here they are. First I want you to learn to be purposeful. And then I want you to identify pleasure. I want you to identify pain, I want you to practice, and that I want you to have some pals, some friends who help you deal with it. Now let me unpack those briefly.

One is, I want you to be purposeful. And by that I mean, when you're developing this habit of dealing with stress, the use stressful way the right way. You need to determine, for instance, what your strategy will be. That means you need to say, here's what I'm going to do and how I'm going to do it. Now I've given you a lot of the tools for that strategy. But you also need to think through what are the triggers that caused me to fall back into a bad habit of responding distressful versus you stressfully to a stress.

And you need to be aware of that and ready for that, and determined to move the right way. For instance, if you're going to deal with an area, that's a bad habit, maybe you're over eating and you're stressed, you find that when you're stressed, you tend to overeat, that becomes a habit response to your stress, you need to be aware of that and you need to fill your mind with the right kind of thoughts on how you need to behave. And that means you need to say I can eat this, like, I can't eat this or I can only so much, not so much other and actually spell that out, write it out, but develop your sense of purpose. And then secondly, you need to determine the pleasure of developing a new habit and get and getting rid of an old habit. You need to list everything that's pleasurable about that.

Not just write it out, but I encourage people to develop a vision vision board where they're actually putting together visuals that demonstrate the pleasure of changing. So perhaps your your stress is people say something and you get angry. And so you want to attach pleasure to not being angry, but being patient and kind and respectful. Instead of being inappropriately angry, and that pleasure may be better relationships with your family or the person you're dealing with, it may be more peace in your personal life, it might be greater productivity, and you want to create some images that will help you do that. Get their help you understand what those are and burn them into your brain. Because unless you have a deep sense of pleasure about something you won't change.

The third thing you need is to identify, in this case, the pain. If you stay in that bad habit, what are the implications? Write those things out? How will your life look like Write them out, you know, maybe you will be less productive, you will be more frustrated, you may die from a heart attack, you may have other physiological problems, you will experience depression, perhaps you will, you will not advance in your business the way you want to advance their whole number of painful things that result in bad habits and you want to be able to really identify what those things are. Again, we're trying to free you up here from stress by developing right habits around dealing with stress the use stressful way and beyond pain. Then the fourth area is you want to practice habits all about practice, practice, practice.

One author has said habit will eat training for lunch all day long. And his point is this. When we train or practice over and over again, it's a good thing but you have to think about it when you train in practice, habits should be unconscious. So just to The way you don't think about how you button your shirt up or down, you just do it naturally is the way we develop habit. So you want it to become a way of life muscle memory that you simply do it over and over again the right way when the stimulus in the past may have caused a wrong action, now it's going to respond in a right action because you've developed the habit of dealing in this case, use use stressfully when it comes to the stress in your life. So practice, practice, practice again.

Many say it takes 21 days to develop a habit. I believe that's a good start, but takes 42 days to reinforce that and turn it into a way of life. And that's what you want to do. So you can build that habit and then move on to another one. And then the final area is pals. That's the fifth area.

We need pals, pa LS we need friends in our lives, who can help us who can be encouragement to us who can be supportive to us, people to whom we can share what we're the habit we're doing. Trying to develop and build. And then who can hold us accountable, saying, Hey, how's it going with that? Are you making progress? Did you accomplish what you wanted to get done? Not in a judgmental way, but in a loving, caring way?

Well, that's what we do to build habits. Again, your success with this in the data come will rise and fall in your ability to develop right habits. So I want you to begin to put that to work. And your action step here is to go to the sheets again, in the resource center that deals with these five P's. And you'll see those on the left and then you'll have room to write on the right when it comes to developing each one of those specifically and spelling out writing out what your purpose is, what the pleasure will be, what the pain attached to not changing will be, and so on and so forth. And watch what starts to happen in your life as you begin to develop habits.

Now we have one more session in this module and that will be the end of our course. And that's on how we live with a sense of making our life win overall how we run the race of life to win. I look forward to being with you in it.