Turn Insight Into Action: ProactiveChange.com/habits

How to change habits

I’d like to share with you something that a client wrote to me about his experience of making some difficult changes:

“I feel like I am beginning the process of kicking an addiction—you get increasingly beat up as you get closer to kicking (or understanding) something (such as fear), but the beatings become less painful and eventually, hopefully, they remain just a part of what makes you tick, and what helps you move forward, and grow.”

Very nicely said, isn’t it?

I just want to add a few comments, to put this paragraph within the context of what habits are, and what it means to change them.

It helps to think of a habit as having two sides:
- an external side: this is what we normally describe as the habit, the material things that you do (for instance, smoking);
- an internal side: the thoughts and emotions that are associated with this habit, and the neural pathways which connect these theses thoughts and emotions together, and connect those with the actions.

If there’s not too much of a charge on the internal side, it’s relatively easy to kick a habit by just dealing with the “external” side. In other words, you “just do it”, as Nike’s slogan says.

What if it doesn’t work? What about the situations that seems to keep defeating you? You try to “just do it”. It works for a while, then it doesn’t. You try again, then stop again... and you feel like a failure.

If your expectation is that “just doing it” will always work, then you’ll feel like a failure when it doesn’t.

On the other hand, if your roadmap includes a perspective on how difficult some changes may be, then you will have a different reaction to your inability to “just do it”. Instead of despairing (or blaming yourself), you will see it as an indication that you need to pay more attention to those internal factors.

You’ll expect the beatings, so you’ll be more prepared to not cave in. You’ll feel the fears, but you’ll be more prepared to stay the course.

In other words: be prepared to change the way you change.

Self-Leadership: a proactive alternative to self-discipline