You’ve entered or you are entering the world of being a work at home mom. While this is an exciting new venture, you’ll need to make changes. It’s important to create new habits, and you need to make new habits stick. It’s much easier said than done.
It’s very easy to let your new habits slide quickly, especially within the first few weeks. You’ll need to make a conscious effort to make these habits stick, so that they do become genuine habits. Not sure how to do that?
I’ve had to change habits more times than I’d like. Between having more children and bringing more dogs into the house, it’s been difficult to get routines. But that’s what habits will become. They end up being routines in your home. Here are my top five tips for making those habits stick.
30-60 days of the habit
It takes about six weeks for a new habit to become, well, a habit. So you need to keep working at your new habits for 30 to 60 days to start seeing results.
Work on the habits day by day. Take each day as they come and avoid looking too far ahead. You may want to dream, but you don’t want to plan out too much. The longer you go on, the more you’ll make new habits stick.
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Start with simple changes
Don’t try to change too much at one time. The more you try to do, the higher chance you have of failing. So, you need to start small and work your way up.
As humans, we tend to be resistant to change. When we bring one or two changes in, our minds try to fight back, which often leads to us giving up on the new habits we’re trying to stick to.
While you may have a few areas in your life where you need to change, do things one at a time. You’ll find it much easier to make multiple smaller changes over a longer period of time than all at once.
More: 5 tips to do less but accomplish more as a WAHM
Get an accountability partner
One of the greatest things I ever did to make new habits stick was to get an accountability partner. This is someone who I check in with on a weekly basis. I share the goals that I have for the week and update on how I did with the previous week’s goals.
When you make your goals or new habits real with someone, it’s much harder to let them slip. You’re not just letting yourself down, but you’re letting your accountability partner down. Okay, so you’re not letting them down so to speak, but you’re admitting to someone that you’ve let yourself down.
Remove the temptations around you
Don’t keep the things around you that will tempt you into breaking the new habits. If you were losing weight, you wouldn’t keep junk food in the house, would you? Those who got Help with Drug Addiction to quit smoking don’t have cigarettes lying around. At least, you wouldn’t if you wanted to make new habits stick and succeed in your new goals.
The same applies when you’re working from home. You need to get rid of anything that tempts you not to follow a new pattern. Maybe it’s the TV on in the background or it’s watching the neighbors fight yet again. Move yourself away from that temptation (or move the temptation away from you).
I have days where Netflix is by biggest downfall. So I have my computer in another room at a desk and I have a no phones policy in that room.
Don’t give up at the first sign of ‘failure’
Guess what, we’re human! That means we’re not perfect. Anybody, and I mean anybody, who expects you to be perfect is expecting far too much and you want to keep them out of your life. One of the things I really struggled with when I first became a work at home mom was perfection because I want to be perfect in everything I do.
It would be easy to give up the first time you’ve “failed” to make new habits stick. However, this just means you’re giving into the idea that you need to be perfect or there’s no point in doing something.
Instead, take a step back and assess why you failed. What did or didn’t you do? What could you do better next time? Implement new strategies to avoid why you “failed,” and how you can make these new habits stick the next time.
What new habits do you have that you want to achieve? What are you struggling to stick to? Share in the comments below.
