How Often Do You Think About Your Habits? - Thoughts from Kevin

0:00How often do you think about your habits? Hi, I'm Kevin Eikenberry, and I'm here to help you reach your potential as a leader and a human being. Welcome to Remarkable TV and the Remarkable Leadership Podcast. Make sure you hit the subscribe button so you don't miss any future episodes. Like this one. Are you ready? Let's get started. So how often do you think about your habits? Well, likely not very often, because they're a habit. Like they're sort of unconscious. We're not really thinking about them. Now you may say, well, Kevin, sometimes I'm thinking about what I think about as my bad habits, but that's not really what I'm, and if you are, that's great. But that's not really what I'm talking about today. So here's the thing, habits are amazing, and habits are necessary for us to survive.

1:02We couldn't get through our day without habits. The research I've read says between 40 and 45% of the things that we do all day long are habitual. They're subconscious. They happen automatically. And this automatic stuff that we're talking about that's so amazing is one of the topics I've talked to the most about here on Remarkable TV over the last dozen or so years. But I've never really talked about what I'm talking about today. So here we go. Number one, habits are amazing and dangerous. I've already talked about the amazing part, but they're dangerous because if we're doing things automatically, and those automatic things aren't serving us, take us back to bad habits that we, if we aren't doing anything about trying to curb, change, adjust them, then we're going to keep on doing those things that aren't serving us. They're amazing because they don't require all of our mental capacity to take action on them, but they're dangerous if what those actions are aren't what we best serve us.

2:07So here's another way to say that is that our auto response is serve us until they don't. Our habits are fabulous until they're not, right? Which leads us to the really the core point of this episode. Here it is. Unexamined habits keep us from improving. So habits are awesome because they allow us to do things automatically. But if we never look at them and we just keep operating on autopilot, we can't improve. And like all of us have things we'd like to get better at. And every organization have things they'd like to get better at. And if we don't examine what we're doing without thinking, we can't possibly improve. We can't even flex. We can't even adapt. We have no shot. Unexamined habits keep us from improving.

3:09This applies to personal habits, of course. And it could be habits that you might have been thinking about coming into this like I want to exercise more, I want to exercise different, I want to eat less, I want to eat different. It could be any of those things, but it's all other sorts of things too. Like how do you respond when someone asks you a question at work? Is that automatic response serving you in every case or not? If you never ask that question, no chance you're going to change it. It applies to organizational habits too, which are things we call best practices, which are things we call our culture, the way we do things around here. And so often we say, hey, we'd like our culture to be different. It requires us to look at our current habits before we can make that change happen. Let me close with today's remarkable reminder. Unexamined habits keep us from improving. How often do you consider yours? This episode has been both about our personal habits and our organizational habits.

4:11We as an organization are here to come alongside you and your organization to help you get better and greater organizational results. If you think from what you've gotten from this episode or other times that you've heard or seen me that we might be able to help you, then send us an email info at KevinIconBerry.com and you'll have no obligation to have a conversation with us about what your challenges are and we can help you think about what we could do to help or where we might point you to get the help that you need. I hope you'll do that and I hope you'll be back next week for another episode of Remarkable TV and the Remarkable Leadership Podcast.