Our lives are filled with habits. Good and bad; from biting our nails to doing yoga at 6am before work.

They can bring out our best or worst and can help us move forward or hold us back.

So, how do we build positive habits. The kinds of rituals that will help us to learn, get fitter or get closer to that dream career or job. Once we’ve identified them, how do we make them stick?

Stories are compelling. Whether it's one on Netflix or involving a colleague at work, we love them. 

Stories are great and it's what makes the world colourful, but we need to be aware that we also have our own stories; the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves. 

We’ve built these stories up in our own heads over the years based on things that have happened in our lives; the things that went well, went badly and importantly how we reacted to them. Our story tells what we think we’re good and bad at. 

A situation that used to make me feel nervous was doing something unknown. Presenting to a group of people I haven’t met before, or going to a job interview where I didn’t know what to expect.   

But then I started to realise how visualisation could help. It's something that lots of hugely successful athletes like the swimmer Michael Phelps use. They create a picture in their mind of what the race or event will look like. They picture themselves right there in the moment. Most importantly what performing well will look and feel like. 

I love music. I’ve played the guitar for about 30 years now and a few years back I used to play gigs around London. It was all solo acoustic stuff.

It was great fun and I (mostly) enjoyed it, but it also taught me A LOT about confidence and getting the best out of myself.

Here are three of the lessons that I continue to use everyday.

No one wants to look like a fool.

Fear of looking a fool can stop us doing a lot of things, from wearing a slightly different outfit to speaking up in meetings.

That’s pretty common, but as a coach, the question I ask clients is how are they interpreting what a fool looks like? In my experience it’s mostly just our own perception based on assumptions we are making about what other people think.

I remember feeling rubbish at my job. I also knew that I was my own worst critic and set very high standards for myself. After struggling for a while, I decided it was logical to measure my peers using the same scale I applied to myself. When I did this, nobody did very well.

That’s when I thought, we are all rubbish at our job. This didn’t make sense, it seemed very unlikely - why would the organisation employ all these people that were rubbish at what they were doing?