Bad Habits to Break in a Personal Development Journey

Most times, starting fresh is really breaking the habits that have been holding us back.

I don’t even remember the day that I started getting obsessed with reading personal development books and listening to podcasts.

But one common thing that they talked about were things to stop doing aka bad habits.

Looking back, I realised how starting fresh or getting a “fresh start” in our lives, starts with breaking bad habits.

Like getting a fresh start on maintaining our health involves breaking the bad eating habits. Getting a fresh start in the semester involves breaking previous bad study habits.

Same with a personal development journey and becoming the best versions of ourselves – it involves breaking previous bad habits.

In this blog post, it will list down 10 habits to break for a “personal development journey” and becoming the best versions of ourselves.

But if there is one thing to remember when reading this blog post, is that every beginning of anything starts with breaking bad habits.

Starting a goal to start a business involves breaking procrastination habits.

Starting a goal to lose weight involves breaking bad eating habits.

Starting a goal to get better grades involves breaking bad study habits.

Listed down will be the habits to break for the goal of becoming better versions of ourselves… here they are:

1) Bad Time Management

This one is actually a bit of an obvious one when you think about it.

I’ve always thought that having bad time management would just mean that I never have enough time to do anything, and I would be late to stuff.

BUT, having bad time management does much more than that! It took me ages to realise that bad time management has a huge impact on my self-esteem… and it’s not so positive.

If we have bad time management, then there’s a high chance that we won’t have time for what is most important. When we don’t know where to manage our time, how to manage our time, and how to plan our time, then of course it could lead to uncompleted deadlines and burnout. What does that all do to our self-image and self-esteem?

Also, what will happen to our self-esteem if we don’t consistently do things that would maximise and save our time for the priorities that we value most? (yes, this is a rhetorical question!).

Time management is really more than just having more time. It’s actually more of making the most out of the time that we have, and making sure we use it effectively and productively.

It’s understandable, life gets busy, and most times we do need to get on top of everything. While that in itself is challenging, it’s even more challenging if we always feel like we are lacking time, because we haven’t been able to manage it properly.

How to Break this Habit: Read the blog post on time management tips to help you improve your time management, and stop making bad time management a habit.

2) Consuming Beneficial Content With No Intention

Think about this – why do we consume healthy food? Obviously, we consume healthy food with the intention of getting healthier and stronger.

However, it is interesting on how when it comes to beneficial (or ‘healthy’) food for the mind, we often (well, a lot of this is me before!) consume it without any intention of doing anything with it.

For example, the first month or so when I first started reading personal development books, I was just reading it. What I mean by ‘just reading it’ is that I was just reading chapter after chapter, with no intention of applying what I read. Honestly, I wasn’t really getting anything out of it because I was never implementing what I read into real life.

The same thing when I started listening to podcasts regularly for the first time. Podcasts were literally just background music, and I never had any intention of applying what I was listening to.

I look back at this now, and I think about how reading and listening to all that beneficial content without any intention of applying it, was just like eating actual healthy food with no intention to eat it in the first place.

Don’t get me wrong… reading and listening to beneficial content is SO good! However, reading and listening is just one useful step that is going to become useless if we never do anything about it.

It’s just like how we can’t just build muscles by watching YouTube videos or speaking to our personal trainer. We actually build the muscles by doing the actual workouts.

So yes, definitely read and listen to motivational, educational, and inspirational content, but also make sure that you will be getting something out of it!

How to break this habit: Simple. Each time you finish reading or listening for the day, reflect on how you can apply what you learned.

3) Taking Shortcuts with Your Goals

Here’s what I mean by this.

We may be able to think of one person who doesn’t want to take the long way to accomplishing something… they want something and they want it now.

We live in a world where we don’t have to commute to the store to buy something, we can order it online, and where we don’t have to spend time cooking, but order it through food delivery. Now it seems like everything we want can be given to us immediately.

It’s the best feeling in the world to find a shortcut to something if we’re able to do a particular thing faster, and be more efficient at the same time. Just like with how it’s so beneficial to have a phone because we can instantly be able to communicate with people, or use navigation instead of those big confusing maps.

But here’s where shortcuts take a downfall…

We don’t really learn much, and I’ll tell you what I mean.

There’s this really interesting story that I heard of, where a family was starting a restaurant. Instead of it growing and taking off the first year of business, it took them five years for their restaurant to become profitable. However, the owner said that the restaurant taking five years for it to become profitable was the best thing that could’ve ever happened to their restaurant. He provides the reason why.

During those five years, they had experienced failure, after failure, after failure. There were times when they almost went bankrupt, they’ve got so many critics who didn’t believe in them… they pretty much had people who were just waiting to watch them fail.

But through all of that they learned something important – resilience and patience.

Five years later, the restaurant now being successful, they have reached success in their restaurant that they would have never planned. The work culture in the restaurant is incredible, and everyone who works there serves their customers with true passion to help them. Customers praise their restaurant for being genuine and thoughtful to them.

Had they not gone through that five years of waiting, they probably would have never learned how to become more resilient and patient. Had they taken “shortcuts”, they probably would have never learned properly how to handle aspects of the restaurant and running it.

That’s why, if we really want to learn, we actually need to take our time with the experiences that we face, because you never know what experience is going to end up becoming a valuable lesson for us in the long-run.

How to break this habit: Turn instant gratification around to help you become more patient in your journey with accomplishing your goals.

4) Developing and Building Habits All At Once

Building habits are actually exciting… especially when you have several habits that you want to develop and work on, because you know that it’s going to improve yourself.

However, one thing I did that wasn’t the best thing to do, was have all these habits that I wanted to build, and try to build them all at once. Then, what ends up happening is that I would get overwhelmed with all these habit tracking, and then I just ended up breaking all of those habits.

How to Break this Habit: Just work on building one habit, one at a time.

5) Playing the blame game/having a closed mindset

I used to do this all time. In high school, I would always find someone to blame for the bad grade that I got in my assessment. I would always think that it had to be someone else’s fault on why I got the grade that I received.

The brutal truth to face was that the grade was 100% my responsibility, and no one else’s.

Even if there was a rare chance that it may have been someone else’s fault, most of the responsibility still came from me. Because there were still people that got a high grade on that assessment, and what was the difference between them and me? It was our difference in the way that we had approached that assignment. Because honestly, it was every student’s goal to get a good grade on that assessment, but ultimately, the difference maker between the ones who achieved it to the one who didn’t, was the system that they had implemented.

How to break this habit: Have a more proactive mindset rather than a reactive mindset. Being reactive and just finding someone to blame isn’t going to change the outcome, but we can make sure that we don’t make the same mistake over and over.

6) Doing the Bare Minimum

I took forever to learn that doing the bare minimum is actually a habit.

Because doing bare minimum is not really about just doing what we can. What we are actually doing is limiting ourselves from our potential, just because we don’t really feel like we can give our 100% in anything.

Keep in mind though, the bare minimum and the best effort for a someone, actually depends on every person.

For example, let’s take two people who had baked a cake. They baked the same chocolate cake (same exact texture, same exact taste… same cake condition).

Person A is just a beginner baker, they have no experience in baking. The chocolate cake that they baked is their best. They worked hard on it. Even though it’s not perfect, it is still an incredible cake.

Person B is an experienced baker, a professional. The chocolate cake that they baked was just their bare minimum. They just stuck with the basics on what they knew, and just took it from there. As an experienced baker, you would expect that the cake that they bake would be better tasting and better presented than the baker with no experience right?

It sounds so cliche, but we would know if we’re actually doing our best, or if we’re actually just doing the bare minimum. We also need to keep in mind that doing the bare minimum for one thing could actually lead to getting used to doing the bare minimum for everything.

How to break the bad habit: Practice giving your 100% in everything that you do, rather than just doing the bare minimum you could do.

7) Consuming Bad Content

Okay, so Bad Habit #2 was all about the good content we consume. This one is about the bad content that we consume.

Going back to our actual body examples, it’s common sense that if we consume our body with a lot of junk, our body is going to become unhealthy. It is the same thing with our minds. What is going to happen if we constantly let so much negative input come in? We’re not going to expect to have a healthy mind.

To add on, if we knew that a certain food was going to poison our body, we’re obviously not going to eat it. It’s the same with our mind, if we know that there is going to be something that is going to ‘poison’ our mind with toxic thoughts or mess up our belief systems, then it’s essential to avoid that poison.

How to break this habit: If we want a healthy mind, we need to get rid of the junk. It’s just like how we would get rid of junk food first in a food diet. Our diet isn’t always the food we eat!

8) Getting Caught Up On What’s Popular

If there was one thing that annoyed me the most in quarantine, was the amount of contradicting advice and tips that came from everybody.

For example, I had mentioned in a previous blog post, on how I would come across advice like “make the most out of your quarantine by being as productive as you can” and “take a rest during the time of lockdown” -advice that were contradicting each other and it was everywhere.

It’s easy to get so much information everywhere you look – books you read, podcasts you listen to, videos you watch… it’s an information overload.

BUT that’s not even the problem, the problem was that all the information would often contradict each other, and it’s so easy to get overwhelmed on not knowing what information should be applied to our own lives.

Like for instance, I would be reading a personal development book that would tell me that in order to achieve success, I have to sleep a proper eight hours and focus on my most important work that I have time for – the moment I read that, it was like a puzzle solved for me, and it was like I gained a whole new perspective.

But then, some time later, I would be listening to a podcast that would give me the opposite advice from what I read in the book. It would say that in order to achieve success, I had to hustle no matter what, and sleep was something that I would need to sacrifice. Because if I really wanted it, I would sacrifice it.

So which one do we follow?

How to break this habit: I’ve found how much of a good practice it was to decide for myself what advice/information I was going to follow. It’s the same for you. It’s you and only you that can decide what you’re going to apply in your life.

If all the information you are getting contradicting each other, a simple step is to look into your own circumstances and the path that you are going on. You have your own strengths and weaknesses that are guaranteed to be different to someone else’s.

Also it’s a good perspective to consider that there is no “one all, fits all” advice out there. There is no “secret magic formula” that would work for every single individual on earth.

Read this blog post on how to apply what is right for you, and not what is popular.

9) Not Asking for Help

Sometimes I feel like asking for help or admitting that I need support on something was “weak”… I was dead wrong on that one.

You don’t know how much time I could’ve saved on myself, and how much stress I would’ve prevented if I had simply just asked for help and support on something.

It’s common sense, but it took me a while to fully realise this. I’m not going to know everything, and it’s always going to be that way, there’s always going to be something that I am going to learn. If I am struggling with something, and just don’t know what to do, I can just ask someone who I trusted.

The worst that could possibly happen is that the person does not know what else to do too, and that is fine.

I used to feel embarrassed about asking for help because I was afraid of very little silly things that could happen. It took me time to realise that I should not let my fear of those silly little things get in the way to speak up and ask for support.

How to break this bad habit: Make it a personal rule of thumb to ask someone who you trust with any assistance or support that you may need. I like to use this practice called “20 seconds of courage”. It takes no more than 20 seconds to shoot a message to someone to ask for assistance. Once that’s done, just leave it at that… just don’t fight everything alone!

10) Taking too much on

There have been plenty of moments where I had set myself up to do a list of things on my to-do list, only to realise that I have taken too much on.

I have been guilty of taking on so many commitments, that it became hard to balance them. I have seen how much of an impact it had. The more commitments that I took on, the lower the quality of my overall work goes down.

When I started taking out the commitments, I ended up seeing how the less commitments I had, the more focus I had, and the higher the quality of my work increased.

How to break this habit: Reflect on the things that you’re committed to right now, and evaluate whether each commitment is worth keeping, the ones you should just put on hold for now, or the ones you should completely drop.

Consider the consequences on what would happen if you were to drop each commitment. If the consequence for dropping a certain commitment was going to have high negative impact, then don’t drop it. If the consequence isn’t going to impact much, it may be worth dropping it.

For example, the consequence of dropping the commitment of work is going to lead to a negative impact, because that would mean that there would be no income coming in. On the other hand, the consequence of dropping the commitment of volunteer work wouldn’t impact much because we’re not earning money, so it would be worth putting volunteer work on hold until our time frees up.

Overall, remember to be kind to yourself

Everyone has different sets of strengths and weaknesses. When it comes to making small changes into our lives, it’s easy to get caught up in the path.

But, what matters most is moving forward rather than pulling ourselves backwards. Move ourselves forward by breaking the habits that bring us down, and build the habits that will bring us closer to our goals. Pulling ourselves backwards is beating ourselves up for the habits we had in the past… at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter because the past is done.

When it comes to going through this personal development journey, we can respond to our little “speed bumps” that go our way. We can turn the bad experiences into good experiences. We can turn our weaknesses into our strengths. We can take change one small step at a time. Even though one day of small changes won’t make a noticeable difference, over a longer period of time we would.

Take it easy on yourself with this… we can all do it! 🙂

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