Daily habits that align with your priorities can keep you on track even when it’s hard to think about the future, and can add stability in precarious moments.
Habits are essential, and we are what we do over and over again.
Why purpose, habits, and values matter
What sets successful organizations apart from everyone else is that they live by their values. They consult values such as focus, trust, participation, and honesty when making decisions. They live their values with their operations as they affect everyone in the company.
Values are who we are and what we want to become. The company’s talent practices and habits are the ‘how’.
People seek motivation from within and value work that they feel good about doing, rather than what they are rewarded for doing or punished for not doing. This means that it is important for people to do work that they see as valuable – to achieve what they feel is important, for an organization whose values they find inspiring.
Habits are the actions we take every day to meet those needs. Today, employees are not just looking for a salary or to avoid risks. They are looking for opportunity, achievement, and more personal motivation to get involved.
Customers want to buy from organizations they feel reflect their own values. People today are skeptical. It is not enough to have a goal or set of values, they need to see it to believe it. This is where habits come into play.
Habits change – purpose and values do not
The purpose should last for many years, and the values should be relatively unchanged. So how do you adapt these fixed ideas and survive in an ever-changing world?
The answer is through our daily habits. Habits are how we achieve our priorities and put our values into practice. Our habits can help us integrate unchanging thoughts into an ever-changing world. We can’t always change our purpose or our values whenever new technology or ideas emerge, can we? But we can change our actions to incorporate new ideas and ways of doing things.
So, one of the best habits you can establish as an entrepreneur is to be an expert navigator of change. Many entrepreneurs today are in a personal dilemma because they do not know how to change or develop on their own without learning from the younger generation. The companies that value development are the ones who will win in the long run.
Putting ideas into practice
The biggest challenge in terms of purpose, values and priorities is that we have a hard time translating big ideas into specific actions and making them part of our culture for the long term. This is because we have a set of values and when we adopt new ways, after a short while we fall back into our old habits. So we have to change our actions to achieve our goals and priorities.
To ensure that your habits align with your work priorities, move away from intellectual notions and focus more on practicing those habits every day. For example, if your priority is to bring transparency to your company, you may notice that no one in the company practices this. But if transparency is your priority, identify and practice habits that reflect it. This is the difference between a dream and reality.