The Miracle Morning: The Not-So-Obvious Secret Guaranteed to Transform Your Life (Before 8AM)

Habitual Failure: New Year’s Resolutions (NYRs)
Every year, millions of well-intentioned people make New Year’s
resolutions, but less than five percent of us stick to them. A NYR is really just
a positive habit (like exercising or early rising) you want to incorporate into
your life, or a negative habit (like smoking or eating fast food) you want to
get rid of. You don’t need a statistic to tell you that, when it comes to NYRs,
most people have already given up and thrown in the towel before January
has even come to a close.
Maybe you’ve seen this phenomenon in real time. If you’ve ever gone to
the gym the first week of January, you know how difficult it can be to find a
parking spot. It’s packed with vehicles owned by people with good intentions,
and armed with a NYR to lose weight and get in shape. However, if you go
back to the gym closer to the end of the month, you’ll notice that half of the
parking lot is empty. Not armed with a proven strategy to stick with their new
habits, the majority continue to fail.
Why is it so difficult to implement and sustain the habits we need to be
happy, healthy, and successful?
Addicted To The Old: Change Is Painful
Yes, we are, at some level, addicted to our habits. Whether
psychologically or physically, once a habit has been reinforced through
enough repetition, it can be very difficult to change. That is, if you don’t have
an effective, proven strategy.
One of the primary reasons most people fail to create and sustain new
habits is because they don’t know what to expect, and they don’t have a
winning strategy.
How Long Does It Really Take To Form A New Habit?
Depending on the article you read or which expert you listen to, you’ll
hear compelling evidence that it takes anywhere from a single hypnosis
session, 21 days, or even up to three months to incorporate a new habit into
your life—or get rid of an old one.
The popular 21-day myth may come from the 1960 book Psycho-
Cybernetics: A New Way To Get More Living Out of Life. Written by
cosmetic surgeon Dr. Maxwell Maltz, he found that amputees took, on
average, 21 days to adjust to the loss of a limb. He argued that people take 21

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days to adjust to any major life changes. Some would argue that how long it
takes for a habit to become truly automatic also depends on the difficulty of
the habit.
My personal experience and the real-world results I’ve seen working
with hundreds of coaching clients has led me to the conclusion that you can
change any habit in 30 days, if you have the right strategy. The problem is,
most people don’t have any strategy, let alone the right one. So, year after
year, they lose confidence in themselves and their ability to improve, as failed
attempt after failed attempt piles up and knocks them down. Something has to
change.
How can you become a master of your habits? How can you take
complete control of your life—and your future—by learning how to identify,
implement, and sustain any positive habit you want, and permanently remove
any negative habit? You’re about to learn the right strategy, one most people
know nothing about.
One of the biggest obstacles preventing most people from implementing
and sustaining positive habits is that they don’t have the right strategy. They
don’t know what to expect and aren’t prepared to overcome the mental and
emotional challenges that are part of the process of implementing any new
habit.
We’ll start by dividing the 30-day time frame necessary to implement a
positive new habit (or get rid of an old, negative habit) into three 10-day
phases. Each of these phases presents a different set of emotional challenges
and mental roadblocks to sticking with the new habit. Since the average
person is not aware of these challenges and roadblocks, when they face them,
they give up because they don’t know what to do to overcome them.