Habits to Achieve more

This blog is inspired by two books, The power of Habit by Charles Duhigg and 7 Habits of highly effective people by Stephen R. Covey

I always have in my mind that one day, I will become a corporate Leader, but when I analyzed myself, I realized with my routine I can never be a leader and I wont be able to handle people.

I am full stack developer and passionate about building products. My day starts and ends with coding and if anything apart from coding I get, I am not ready to take it as coding has been my comfort zone. With just interacting with computers how do I become a people’s leader. That’s when I started focusing much on my weaknesses and thinking how do I strengthen myself. The thought process goes like this.

I started studying about leaders, especially their day to day life. I understood, there are few things common in their routine and they are very much disciplined about it. I always wonder, how do I become disciplined about something. The only way to do is, make things which you always want to do as your Habits.

Making something as a Habit is something very difficult. So here is the way I tricked my brain as suggested in the book, The Power of Habit.

Cue-Action-Reward. When you want something to become your habit, make it as Cue, means you encourage yourself to take action so that if the action is taken you will something is achieved. And once you take action, you reward yourself with something that pleases you.

21/90 Rule: Whatever you want to make as a habit, do it for three straight weeks, doing the same thing for 21 days becomes a habit. Then If it is continued for another 90 days, it becomes a permanent lifestyle.

Creating a new Habit is fine, but what are all the habits you need to build to become a leader.

That is when, the book, “7 Habits of highly effective people” helped me. It is very straight and simple. I am penning it down the 7 habits and its brief explanation how it can be achieved easily.

1. Be Proactive and take control of your own fate: Taking responsibility of the situation instead of blaming everything and everyone around.
2. Begin with an end in Mind: Visualize you end destiny before even taking the first step, plan and then act.Write a personal mission statement and integrate it into your daily life.
3. Put first things first: Rigorously prioritize everything, so that important things are always taken care of first.
4. Think win-win — With any deal, always think a win situation for you and your counterpart.
5. Seek first to understand, then to be understood: Before explaining things to people and providing them a solution or suggestion, try to understand the whole picture first.
6. Synergize by treating others with openness and respect: Synergy means the result where the contribution of many is equal to more than the combined contributions of the individuals. Means, when things combined in a perfect way, one plus one may equals three or more.
7. Sharpen the saw, if you want to keep sawing: This is nothing but, keep learning till the time you want to get rewarded.

These are my observations and probably my action points to become a leader. Hope soon I will become what I want to.