The Importance of Creating Intentional Habits and Taking Risks with David Wood

From a young age, you’ve formed habits in your life that shaped you into the person you are today. And most of the time, those habits weren’t intentional, they were instilled when you observed the world and the people around you. These habits follow you around throughout all the aspects of your life and make your successes and failures. There’s the saying it takes 21 days to make a new habit – however, it takes more effort than that.  

David Wood, the founder of Focus CEO, joins us on Making Bank to talk about how to establish habits that help you thrive and how to stick to these habits. A successful, highly motivated businessman, Wood talks about the positive effects of forming habits that better you and better your business. While discussing these routines, Wood also talks about taking chances. 

Choosing your habit and acting on it is important in reaching your goals and your achievements, along with taking risks and going for what you want. Wood gives his advice on how to successfully stick to the habits that overall benefit your life, while discussing the balances of taking risks.  

Choosing Your Habits  

One of the most important things that Wood says about creating new habits is staying on track and being dedicated. Maybe you’ve got to set reminders or write sticky notes to remind yourself the first couple of days or weeks, and that’s okay. Until you’ve got the base of what you want to do ingrained in your brain, you’ve got to train your brain to remember the action that you want to develop in the first place 

“The thing is, my clients tend to run into snags. You know, it’s like they…put in the steps, but then email took them away or their family was distracting them or they felt like they needed to be available to their staff all the time,” Wood says of focusing directly on habits. It’s easy to get distracted and give up on your habit early on and preventing it from becoming a real habit in the first place. 

Life is always going to throw different things at you at different times and you need to be able to filter what you’re handling at a certain time. Take the time to decide what you want to spend your energy on and what you want to personally work on rather than what you’re expected to work onAchievement comes with focused energy and dedicated time, there is no shortcut to it 

Making something into a habit doesn’t have a specific number of days it’ll take to stick. It depends on the person. The first step is making sure you’re doing it daily, reminding yourself weekly of your goals and how you want to achieve them.  

“30 days is a good start after 90 days, particularly if you have support of some kind, whether it be a program or a coach, you should be pretty solid.” Putting the time into your habits is the first step of the successful achievement of the goals you’re deliberately putting in place.  

Habits need to be practiced daily, and they require a lot of focus – however, once creating a successful habit it only gets easier accomplish the things you want.

Taking the Risks 

Along with forming beneficial habits, Wood says that success comes with taking risks and chances. “I like feeling proud when I’ve stretched a boundary for myself and I’ve done something that feels scary. And I’ve pushed back the boundaries. And what was scary 10 years ago is no longer scary. I choose new scary things,” Wood says. The risks that he’s taken rewarded him in more ways than one, and often opened the doors and made him comfortable with being uncomfortable. 

Growth doesn’t happen without changes. Wood encourages courage – to step beyond the lines of comfort and to immerse yourself in the fear of something new, something different than what you’re used to. Encouraging reflection on fear, Wood urges his clients to answer the question, “If I was fearless this week, what would I do?”  

To be daring doesn’t mean you’ve got to do crazy things, like jumping out of airplanes, but it means you’re conquering something that you’ve always wanted to do without stopping yourself – and that’s sometimes scary.  Look at your business; what is stopping you from getting what you want? What thought are you pushing down simply because it seems too “crazy?” 

Breaking these boundaries can create the opportunities that you’ve dreamt of. That is not to say that you’re not going to face failure, because you will. But each failure is a lesson learnt, something that you can grow from.  

Beyond opening new doors in business, being daring is being the person that you’re meant to be. If your heart wants something but your brain is getting in the way, you’re putting that limit on yourself. Push past yourself and your fears, jump into your life without looking back. And in that, your business will thrive. 

Between creating habits and pushing yourself beyond the limits you think you’re capable of, growth thrives through your experiences. In your personal or business life, Wood suggests that these lessons will only create more victories 

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