If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude. – Maya Angelou
I bet you have some harmful habits that you would love to change. What are some of the things you wish you didn’t do? We all have habits that limit us, things we just can’t help doing and we swear we will never do again. Nobody is perfect and everybody has limiting habits—some more than others—but we generally notice our harmful habits once they are already limiting us in some way and we find ourselves saying things like “I wish I could just be more…” or “I wish I didn’t always do that”, and then we simply move onto the next thought, and it is forgotten.
Have you considered how much of an influence your habits have on your life right now? Half your day consists of habits, from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep. Did you know that almost 40% of the actions you take every day are habitual? Meaning, you act automatically without really making active decisions; you just do. This happens because your brain needs to form habits in order to free up space for other important things. Imagine if you had to learn how to drive and brush your teeth every day; it wouldn’t be much fun would it?
Over the years, you have likely picked up and developed many different habits, some good and some bad, and your habits lead to the results you have in your life right now. Are you happy with them? It is much easier to work towards changing your limiting habits now than to live with the consequences of them later. If you don’t change your habits, you keep reinforcing them, which makes it more difficult to change at a later stage. To effectively change a habit, you need to understand how you are forming them and what makes a habit, a habit.
