Habits are powerful factors in our lives because they are consistent, often unconscious patterns, they express our character and produce our effectiveness or ineffectiveness.

Tips that can help you to wipe out negative habits and increase your personal and professional effectiveness.

# Be proactive. Don't wait for things to happen to you; take the initiative. For example, reactive individuals let the weather, their mood and other people's actions affect their performance. Proactive people, on the other hand, perform well regardless of external circumstances.

# Begin with the end in mind. Visualize the end and write a program that will help you get there. To have a successful ending, write and follow the steps necessary to achieve your goal.

# Put first things first. Prioritizing your activities and executing them in order of importance or urgency (see "To-Do List Dilemma," Motivation, this issue) is the key to life and time management. It will require willpower to do things when you don't want to do them, even though they should be done at that given moment.

# Think win/win. Seek solutions or agreements that are beneficial to everyone involved. All parties will feel good about the decisions and committed to the action plan.

# Seek first to understand, then to be understood. Abandon the urge to be understood first. Instead, listen with an empathetic ear. Train yourself to really hear the other person with whom you're having a conversation, and try to understand their point of view before you express your own.