When I practiced full time as a clinical hypnotherapist, a man came into my office wanting to lose a lot of weight. He introduced himself as Jim. He looked beaten down. His shirt missed a couple buttons, and I saw tangles throughout his oily, shoulder length hair. He still had morning breath at 2:15 PM.



Jim explained to me that he had already undergone a quadruple bypass, and his doctor said that if the weight didn't go he would die soon. He was also scheduled for his third knee surgery the following week.

He told me about all the weight loss programs that had failed him. He read every book ever published on weight loss. He probably knew more about losing weight than most personal trainers and weight loss advisors.

Still, there he sat, all 300-plus pounds of him. Even though his life literally depended on it, he was unable to keep off the weight. All his knowledge of caloric intake and how much activity it takes to burn a pound of fat didn't help him one bit. Jim was dying.

He viewed coming to see me as a last ditch effort to save his life. He didn't believe in hypnosis, he said, but he'd stopped believing in almost everything else, too. There was nothing left for him to try.

Because of his opinion on hypnosis, I used that tool very sparingly. Instead, I focused on getting him to open up, which he did. I learned that not only did Jim have poor eating habits, almost every habit in his life, it turned out, affected him in a bad way.

Our work together lasted about 8 weeks. We focused on making very small changes to Jim's daily routines. We interrupted his patterns and created new habits. Instead of pizza 4 nights a week, he would only have it 3. Rather than sleeping 12 hours, he'd sleep 10.

By the end of the 8th week, Jim had not lost a pound. He did, however, learn how to create new, healthier habits. He learned he was not a slave, chained to his comfort zone, and that by incorporating the habits he had learned into his life, these became his new comfort zone.

The last time I saw Jim, he caught me off guard. We were at an art gallery. He walked up, shook my hand, and started laughing. "I get that a lot," he said, seeing the puzzled look on my face. I almost cried when I recognized the man before me.

I've heard it said that the difference beween successful people and unsuccessful people are their habits. Nowhere is this more true than in network marketing. When we talk about habits, we usually refer to bad habits. We build habits by repeating action. This action, however, can be bad or good, helpful or hurtful.

To hear some people talk, you would think that habits just happen without our control. Did you ever try to break a habit? It can be a difficult and painful thing to do, but with a strong enough commitment, it can be done.

If habits are so powerful, imagine creating a beneficial habit, like a new work habit. How would it be if your prospecting tasks became automatic, like brushing your teeth? Consistency is the hallmark of a stable person. Habits create this consistency.

How do you create a habit? One word: Repetition. Repetition is the mother of all skill. If you repeat an action every day for 30 days, you create a habit. This is true whether your goal is exercise, business, or personal.

To be truly effective, start small. Instead of vowing to call 10 prospects a day, start with 1. If you can't dedicate 3 hours a day to your business right now, start with 15 minutes. Small, consistent steps over time create huge, long-lasting results.

You must develop confidence as your primary habit. Without knowing that you have something of value to provide your customers and business associates, everything else falls flat. If you don't believe in yourself, nobody else will, either.

You develop confidence with small, private victories. If you commit to contacting 1 prospect a day, and keep that commitment, your confidence grows. If you increase that to 2 a day, it gets even stronger.

Discipline also ranks high on any list of habits. Discipline simply means the ability to get necessary actions done. It means taking the steps, regardless of how you feel or what's going on in your life, to insure that you will be successful.

In the US Army, my drill instructors pounded discipline into my skull. Being sick was irrelevant, because the enemy wouldn't care if you were sick or not. They'd just kill you. The same if you were tired, or just found out your wife was leaving you (this happened to a few guys in my platoon).

You could cry all you wanted, but the drill instructors knew the ingredients of success. Whether that success happens on the battlefield or while working on your business, you still need the same habits. Rain or shine, you simply must take action.

Drill sergeants also taught me motivation. Motivation is very similar to discipline, only it require more emotional input. To exercise discipline, you need a certain amount of motivation. Believe me, when you're cold and wet, you need motivation to climb the muddy hill in front of you.

An enemy chasing you would provide such needed motivation. For me, it was a drill sergeant with biceps big around as my waist, yelling at me. I would probably have done anything this person told me to do.

As scary as my Army experience was, today I hear my own inner drill sergeant yelling, "You better make them calls, you airhead!" It still motivates me today, even though I'm warm and dry.

You maintain motivation by reminding yourself why you do what you do. For me, motivational cd's do the trick, especially while I'm driving. I also read books on success and self improvement. Ten to twenty minutes a day is all it takes.

Your habits determine where you're going. Take some time now, right now, as you read these words, and examine your habits. What do you habitually do every day? If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten. Is that satisfactory to you?