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Daily habits that align with your priorities can keep you on track even when it’s hard to think ahead, and they can add stability in otherwise unsteady moments.
Habits are essential, and we are what we repeatedly do.
Why Purpose, Habits, and Values Matter
What distinguishes successful organizations from everyone else is that they live their values. They consult values such as focus, trust, engagement, and honesty when making decisions. They live their values with their processes because they affect everyone in the company.
Values are who we are and what we want to become. Talent practices and habits in the company are the “how.”
People seek motivation from within and they value work they feel good about doing, rather than what they’re rewarded for doing or punished for not doing. This means it’s important for people to do work they find valuable – to achieve what they feel is important, for an organization whose values they find inspiring.
Habits are the actions we take daily to meet those needs. Today, employees aren’t just looking for a paycheck or to avoid risks. They’re looking for opportunities, fulfillment, and more personal drivers of engagement.
And customers want to buy from organizations they feel reflect their own values. People today are skeptical. It’s not enough to have a purpose or a set of values, they need to see it to believe it. And, that’s where habits come in.
Habits Change – Purpose and Values Don’t
Purpose should last for many years, and values should be relatively unchanging. So, how do you adapt these unchanging ideas and survive in a world that’s constantly changing?
The answer is, through our daily habits. Habits are how we can achieve our priorities and put our values into practice. Our habits can help us integrate unchanging ideas into a world that’s ever-changing. We can’t always change our purpose or values whenever a new technology or ideas come along, 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 cultivate as an entrepreneur is to be an expert navigator of change. Many entrepreneurs today are in a personal quandary because they don’t know how to change or evolve on their own without learning from the younger generation. It’s companies that value evolution that will win in the long run.
Putting Ideas into Action
The biggest challenge around purpose, values, and priorities is that we have a hard time translating big ideas into specific actions and making them part of our culture over the long run. This is because we have a set of values and when we adopt new ways, after a short while we go back to our old habits. So we have to change our actions to achieve our goals and priorities.
To make sure your habits align with your business priorities, move away from intellectual concepts and focus more on practicing those habits daily. For example, if your priority is to bring transparency to your company, you may notice that no one in the company is practicing that. But if transparency is your priority, define and practice habits that reflect it. That is the difference between dreams and reality.
