Happy New Year! Ah, January. My old friend. The month in which the number of people signing up for gym memberships skyrockets.
We all love turning over a new leaf, don’t we? “This year will be different,” we tell ourselves. “This year we’ll actually do it.”
Then comes reality. Despite our resolve, we just never seem to be able to sustain our desired change.
Why, despite truly believing that we have the conviction, do we all fail to break out of our bad habits time and time again?
Because, chances are you’re doing it all wrong.
Simply deciding to break a bad habit doesn’t mean you’ve broken it at all! It’s easy to sign up for the gym. It’s easy to kit out your wardrobe with Activewear.
The decision is easy.
But once the motivation wears thin and the new resolution ceases to be something new and exciting, we all tend to find ourselves back in the same rut as before.
When it comes down to how to break a bad habit, there are three essential ingredients:
1) Remove the barrier
2) Create an incentive
3) Implement a routine
Let’s continue running on the treadmill that is our gym analogy.
Remove the barrier
People mistakenly believe that ‘gym membership’ is the barrier to getting fit. Get membership, get fit.
It’s an easy ‘barrier’ to overcome and that’s why so many do it.
But it’s not the real barrier.
The real barrier is apathy. Gym requires intense physical exertion, mental stamina and a lot of time and effort.
Unless your gym membership comes with a complimentary rewiring of the brain, just receiving your little swipe-card isn’t going to make you fit.
You need to remove the actual obstacle that’s getting in the way of your goal.
Create an incentive
Incentive? Uh, that’s easy! Toned physique, incredible abs, head turns every time I enter a room!
Those are all nice goals. But they’re not incentives.
Goals are the end product as a result of the process. Incentives keep you on right track and drive you to take each and every individual step along the way to that goal.
A proper incentive will strengthen you to resist the urge to slip back into your old ways.
Implement a routine
Bad habits are broken—and new ones formed—by putting in place measures to ensure that you’re forced to do the right thing.
If you resolve to go to gym just when you’re “in the mood” or “get a chance”, you might as well say bye-bye to your New Year resolution now.
If you resolve to go on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday at 6:00pm with your best mate Alonzo, chances are you’ll be forced to stick to that commitment.
Create a set routine, put it in your calendar and keep to the schedule with vigour.
Customer service training
But you’re not reading this for Personal Training tips.
You’re reading this because chances are your 2017 New Year’s Resolution is to get your team providing outstanding customer service.
It isn’t enough to simply sign them up for training courses, plonk them down for a seminar and hope for the best.
You’ve tried that.
The difficultly barriers are still there!
The lack of incentive to learn, listen and improve is still there!
And the lack of a consistent routine is very, very much still there!
An effective customer service training program needs to be designed from the ground up to address this very 21st century business predicament.
Online, targeted customer service training, like Canity, creates a framework for successful, sustained training.
Five minutes a day. Every day. Direct to your inbox – wherever, whenever.
It’s barrier-free in every sense of the word.
Through bite-sized, animated video lessons that are actually enjoyable, the incentive to engage is there.
Canity isn’t about just signing up to become customer service fit; it’s about making sure your team is kept on track to actually becoming customer service pros.
To find out more visit canity.com.
