In recent months I increasingly realised that life is all about the habits you create – most often subconsciously. If you want to be successful in life, you need to diligently work on building the right habits that bring you closer to success a little bit every day. We often don’t realise that it’s the small things we do every day and the small choices we take repeatedly that will lead us to the bigger picture.

Did you notice that it’s so much harder to build new, positive habits, such as eating more healthily and exercising daily; than to stop old habits that prevent you from reaching your goals? I recently read on a motivating blog that I follow, that as soon as you hit that resistance while doing something, for example learning a new language or exercising, that means that you’re growing. Whenever we hit that inner resistance, we must keep going in order to grow and get a step closer to our goals. And that’s why it’s so hard to add new habits to our daily lives as we need to get over that mental barrier first and push ourselves a bit to start doing it, for example to do that yoga practice in the morning, and afterwards we will always feel better for having done it. In English, it sounds pretty good to say ‘to conquer your weaker self’, while in German there’s this weird image of fighting against your inner ‘swine dog’ to overcome that resistance and do the things that will make you grow.

In times of the Corona crisis, I feel that it gives us all a great chance to rethink our daily routines and our small daily habits. For those of us, who have been allowed (or in most cases forced) to work from home, it gives us a great opportunity to rethink our daily routine and add more of the things that we could not normally do in our working week. For me personally, not having to get dressed in business clothes every morning and not having to commute saves me time and allows me to sleep a little longer (which I normally miss out on) plus exercise every day. Also, having a kitchen at home but also supermarkets and restaurants nearby, I can make healthier and more natural eating choices every day. For me, the focus here is on ‘natural’ – doing things when they feel right, for example working more in the evening when I’m most productive and less in the morning, when I’m too sleepy. At the same time, I also experienced that whenever I didn’t do my new exercise routine for one or two days in a row, I have to overcome my inner resistance once again to re-start my new habits.

Today I also shockingly realised that I haven’t written a blog article since November 2019! And that can be traced back to me always feeling like I need to set a lot of time aside first to be able to write; or making some other kind of excuses. ‘Better done than perfect!’, is something I am still trying to incorporate into my life.

How has the new Corona outbreak or self-quarantine made you change your daily routine and habits?

– Her

If one of the new habits you would like to establish is to learn a language, these articles might also be of interest to you:

• 5 Tips For Studying A New Language
• Doing an HSK test in Shanghai for the first time!