How are you getting on planning your business future in this new world?
Are you spending enough time on your marketing or are you engrossed in the small stuff every day , catching up on all those things you didn’t do in Lockdown?
One of the most valuable things ( there were many ) I learned from the Entrepreneurs Marketing and Sales System was to spend 90 minutes each day working on the business not in the business. @Nigel Botterell has done this successfully for many years so as I launched my coaching business this was a major key to its successful launch. Umm do what you teach others to do, how many of us do that ?
I though Lockdown would be a great time to implement this +0 minute idea because after all it only takes 21 days to create a new habit after all. Imagine my disappointment when on the 22 day things weren’t running like clockwork and 90 minutes was fully part of my routine. OK working from home creates issues you don’t have in your own office but was that really the reason?
I decided to investigate.
I discovered that it was a plastic surgeon, Maxwell Malz who discovered this pattern in the 1950’s with his patents. What he found was it would take a patient of about 21 days to get used to seeing their new face. This prompted him to look at his own adjustments to change and new behaviours and he noticed it took about 21 days to form a new habit.
In 1960 Maltz published a quote in his book Psycho Cybernetics. This is when it all stared to go wrong. His quote was he said “a MINIMUM of about 21 days”.
Subsequently just about every self help professional forgot the “minimum” and “about” and the quote became to takes 21 days to form a habit. A great example of ,if enough people say something it can become a fact. 21 days is a short enough time to be inspiring and believe you can do it, but how many people have given up when a few more days they could have cracked the new habit. Other scientific studies have shown it, on average , takes 66 days but it can be as little as 18 days or as much as 254 days.
So if you haven’t formed that new habit yet, stick with it, it might take longer than you think.