In Japanese, Kata is a series of moves practiced over and over in attempt to achieve perfect form.  They are often used when teaching Karate, with the student being counseled to visualize the potential enemy attacks and their responses.

Kata provides a discipline to changing your habits.  That’s important, because changing our habits is one of the hardest things to do.  No matter how hard we try, we often quickly fall back on old ways.  And it is the old way that keep us stuck.

Kata manifests itself in Toyota Motor Corporation as a two-week improvement cycle in which every work center supervisor must improve something every two weeks.  The continual practice creates a pattern that is second nature.

The need for daily repetition to create habits and change outcomes is well established in many domains.  Repetition and practice are prerequisites to mastery.

You can’t go to a motivational seminar once a year and expect it to make a difference.  You can’t write whenever you feel like it and expect to write the next great novel.  Construct a Kata for the changes you want to make in your life and in your business and then, by repetition and practice, turn them into habits.

I believe the biggest problem most of us have in making our business grow isn’t lack of knowledge about what to do, it the inability to commit fully and pattern ourselves to make it happen.

What things do you need to do to make your business successful?  What will your Kata be to make them happen?

Its so easy to become comfortable.  Maybe you haven’t really started your internet business.  You’ve got a day job and you  drag yourself through it every day.  Then you come home and tweak your website layout a little bit or work on another graphic.  But its the stuff you already know how to do.

Stop.

You’re keeping yourself busy.  But you’re in a rut.  You’re doing the easy comfortable thing.  You’re sleepwalking.  Success doesn’t come from inside your comfort zone.  Success comes from testing your boundaries; from pushing the limits.  It comes from doing “”the one big thing”.  What’s the one big thing that you could do, right now, that would make a big difference in your business.

If you’ve been trying to make money on the internet for a while, you probably have a good sense of that the one big thing is for you right now.

The problem most people have is that they do something easier; something more comfortable;

For some people, they get their website setup then never ever start creating the content to fill it.  For other, they won’t start doing the social media promotions they know they should be doing.  For still others, its the failure to put together a product; or setup an email list; or start advertising.  They may be working but they are just working in their comfort zone.

Whats’s the one big thing you need to do?  Between this and other websites, you’ve probably figured out what you need to do.  You probably know what the one big thing is you need to do to get to the next level.

What bit of work is the most uncomfortable?  What thing that you could do to grow your business scares you the most?   The answer to those questions is probably the thing you need to do.  Fear and discomfort are the universe’s way of telling you what work is the most important.  The things you are afraid of are the things you know are important and must be done, but that cause you the most discomfort.  If they weren’t important, you wouldn’t even be thinking about them.

Figure out what the “one big thing” is for you.  Then attack it with all your energy.  Attack it fearlessly.  Once you’ve made it routine, there will be another big thing.

The more you break down those barriers, the greater your success will be.

So start now!!

What do you do everyday?  Get up.  Have coffee or breakfast.  Drive the kids to school and yourself to work.  Drag yourself through the day.  Pick up the kids.  Have dinner.  Sleep.  Repeat until the weekend.    Then spend the two days that you own getting ready to do it all again.

Then you wonder where you’re going to find the time to get anything done that will really make a difference in your life.

Your habits control you.  The environment that you let form around you, controls you.

You have to take control of it.  You need to change your habits and shake up your routine.

Clean up.  Get rid of the stuff you don’t need.  The clutter clutters your mind.  Maybe that’s the first habit you need to create.

Or write.  Make sure you write for an hour ever day.   Just find a corner and write.  Maybe publish them on your blog.  Maybe just save them up so you can use them later.

Take stock of your life.  Make a decision about what you want to change.  Make one small thing happen and then stick with it.  Stick with it until it becomes a new habit.

For 99% of people, the thing that keeps them from becoming great is not lack of knowledge.  Its the failure to start and stick with it.  If you chose a direction and stick with it long enough something will happen.  As I wrote yesterday, “You don’t have to start to be great, you have to be great to start”   Make sure you are taking a step towards you goal every day.  Even if its a tiny step.

There are days that I feel totally frustrated.  It seems as if nothing that I’m doing is working.   It seems as if I will never find the success that I want.  But I follow Steven Pressfield’s advice from “The War of Art” – which in summary says “A professional shows up and does the work”.   Well, its says a lot more that that – and you should just read it – but showing up and doing the work is a key point.  And as I keep showing up and doing the work, inspiration arrives.  And then strangely, little successes start arriving.

But it comes from making a habit of what you need to do.

What are your habits?  What do you need them to be in order for you to achieve the success that you want?

As my friend, Claude Viens says in the title of his book, “The Most Powerful Weight Loss Device Ever Invented; The Human Brain”.  He could go a lot further.  Its the most powerful business building system ever invented.  You won’t find it in all the programs you can buy online or all the books you can read.  Its in you and you have to program it with the habits you need to succeed.

Change your habits.  Change your life.

Start now.