Your Maintenance Plan
Episode #10 of the course Confidence: The secret to your success! by Eileen Purdy
“Use it or lose it” is a popular phrase that refers to many things. Confidence is one of them. It’s important to set up an ongoing success plan for the long haul so you can create your big dreams!
How, you ask? Be like a pilot. Pilots have known this for a long time. They have a checklist that they go through each and every time they fly. And they have a checklist for when things malfunction and another checklist for emergencies. They use a line-by-line register of specific items, used to make sure that important tasks have been completed and none skipped.
It’s not because they don’t know what to do and need to be reminded, it’s that our brains can get distracted and comfortable and occasionally miss things.
We may think that checklists are just for getting us started with new things and that once something is working, we can stop with doing all those checklisty practices.
On some level, that makes sense, but when we step back we see that it is because we were doing those things consistently with a checklist that we were having the success. So don’t stop because you have gotten the results you wanted, continue because you were getting the results you wanted!
Another reason to keep a checklist is because of our tendency to slink back into bad habits. We do this so easily. Habits are tricky business.
Habits are the small decisions you make and actions you perform every day without even thinking about them. They are created slowly, over time, under our radar. According to researchers at Duke University, habits account for about 40 percent of our behaviors on any given day. That is almost half of our day!
It’s pretty fair to say that your life today is essentially the sum of your habits. Which is a bit weird to think of. But true.
So in order to avoid the backslide once you get your confidence going, use a personal daily checklist! Here is how it might look.
▫ I’m going to 5-4-3-2-1 out of bed every day.
▫ I’m going to mimic these three things today from someone I want to be like: ____________,____________,____________.
▫ Every time I go through a doorway, I’m going to practice the 4-7-8 breath so I’m ready to step outside my comfort zone when I need to.
▫ I’m going to try to see, read, and experience one new thing every day.
Now make your own. It can change every couple of days or each week, but the key is that you make a list of confidence strategies to try every day. And then stick to them. Just like a pilot.
Want to learn more about changing habits? James Clear offers a great, free ebook on how to do this.
Recommended book
“Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It” by Kamal Ravikant
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