If you focus on these four key habits each morning, they will help you to experience breakthroughs in all aspects of your life.  

Top performers understand the importance of picturing and seeing themselves succeed.

Visualizing and doing are both needed to optimize your success. Both complement and reinforce each other to help you achieve your goals.

When we visualize something, we activate similar brain circuits as we do when we experience it. Our brains can’t tell the difference between an actual event and a vivid visualization.   

Visualization involves imagining yourself achieving your goals. The more details you visualize the more real it becomes. Each time you visualize the goal, it strengthens the neural connections in your brain. 

One of the powerful benefits of visualization over simply acting is that it prepares you mentally. 

Visualization enables you to create ideal thinking patterns and habits in a deliberative manner that optimizes your results.

Visualization boosts your self-esteem and confidence. It motivates you. It improves your focus. It rewires your brain.  

Habit change

To ponder is to be contemplative, intentional, and purposeful. It is to think about something deeply. For many pondering accompanies deep prayer. 

Pondering provides a deeper sense of purpose in your planning. It helps you to be less reactive and more intentional. It enables you to become the master gardener of your thoughts. It strengthens your ability to become the designer and builder of your destiny. 

You should plan both weekly and daily: 

Weekly planning helps you to be more strategic, get out of the noise, and concentrate on and plan out your top priorities.

Daily planning helps you to manage your life – instead of allowing it to control you. Each day you prioritize your tasks, keep track of your progress, and ensure that you follow through on priorities.

Habit change

Review your habits daily.  Tracking your progress will help to motivate you to complete your desired ones, and overcome your ones.   

Habits take center stage in helping you to reach your vision. 

Your habits are what you repeatedly do. They are actions and behaviors that you perform almost without thinking. 

A study conducted by Wendy Wood, Ph.D., a psychologist at the University of Southern California (USC), found that 43% of everyday actions are habit-based.  

WONDERFUL BLESSING AND TERRIBLE CURSE 

Habits can be a wonderful blessing and a terrible curse.  

Good Habits

Habits can be powerful! They can be the foundations that bring about the desired change in your life - one step at a time. They can help to ensure that your desired change becomes an integral part of your life. 

Bad Habits 

Bad habits impede our progress, destroy our self-image, hinder our ability to serve others, be our best, and can put others at risk. Bad habits can cause us to become confused about our priorities and compromise our future. 

Those who live and are consumed in lust and self-deceit never find or lose their purpose. Even when their lives become painful and destructive, many find a way to become comfortable with it. Bad habits can only be broken by those who are willing to change.

Habits Begin with Thoughts

Habits begin with thoughts. Developing desired habits means being intentional. As you move forward with focus and persistence you shape yourself so you become who you yearn to be.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.” 

Habit change

To tend your mind is to become the “master-gardener” of your thoughts. To tend is to grow and nurture constructive thoughts that strengthen you and others. To tend is also to halt and weed out those destructive thoughts that tear you down and weaken others. Constructive thoughts build. Destructive thoughts tear down. They also distract us. 

Constructive thoughts come from being proactive (e.g., planning, preparing, building, improving, growing).  Destructive thoughts frequently come from feelings such as selfishness, anxiety, fear, and arrogance.

Tending Your Mind - Initially a Conscious Process 

Tending your mind is initially a conscious process. You remind yourself to be observant of both your constructive and destructive thoughts. When you experience a destructive thought, remind yourself of the immediate and long-term effects of that thought. Consciously choose to replace the destructive thought with a constructive one. 

Each time you tend your mind, you are establishing one of the most important habits in your life.