The Habit

Habits are created by doing something over and over receiving reinforcement each time. You may have heard that the 45th time you do something in a row then it becomes a habit. I am not speaking here of addiction which may become habit forming much quicker.

The negative habits and the positive habits appear to develop at different rates. The main focus of today's blog will be how do you take the knowledge that repetition creates habit, that practice makes permanent and use it to your advantage.

Maybe the reason that a positive habit takes longer to re-enforce is shear force of gravity, or the gravity of former behavior. It has taken many years to develop the behavior that you are replacing with the new behavior. The gravity of the behavior can pull you back to your comfort zone quickly. This is not to be feared. Just suspended as wisdom.

Perhaps the reason for the difficulty is laziness-it's easier to stay stuck then to muster the inertia to get unstuck.

I would like to suspend for right now the shamefulness of laziness and call a more descriptive bare-bones idea of what I believe is really keeping you stuck. . .

To get unstuck there needs to be a habit developed before other positive habits can maintain long term consistent change.

This is the habit of doing the things you know you need to do, even when the emotions would say otherwise, even when the physical strength left would say otherwise, and even when you are not mentally feeling tough enough to go through it.

This seems so simple. Yep, but what is simple to do is simple not to. The reason someone cannot stick to the commitments they set up is because they mentally force doubt and rationalization onto it, they emotionally are brought down and confidence is shaken, and physically their energy immediately has given way to fear. Fear saps the energy more then any other emotion. The same is true with faith, faith in a process restores energy more then any other emotion. Faith combined with knowledge or belief creates hope and hope fills energy beyond our understanding.

So practical solution. You are going to laugh at this it is so basic. You may not even apply it, are you ready?

An apple a day.

The idea is that you eat an apple a day. This represents the small disciplines that you know you need to do, that will not kill you today if you don't, but over the course of time will eventually take you out. You eat a candy bar a day for 365 days you will look feel think different then if you ate an apple.

Take out a notepad and every night for 30 days (a month from today) decide on one discipline that you know you will do for 30 days straight (must be something you have faith in and believe that you can) mark your progress nightly and see how well you do. Don't at first set the bar too high, as you become disciplined in small things, greater things will be given.

Confidence is grown in the small victories throughout a day.

Joshua Andrus
www.hiresite.info