Nearly everything we do is habitual. We’re used to thinking a certain way and acting a certain way. This serves us most of the time and yet it can be an obstacle when attempting to do something new.
We’re wired for the lives we have. We know this to be true because they’re the lives we are living. This does not mean that they’re the lives we were meant to have or anything that fatalistic, only that we keep doing the things that keep our realities in place.
One example that most of us have heard of is how many lottery winners wind up exactly where they started within a year or two of winning. This is because there is a certain comfort in what we know and we keep returning there no matter what happens.
In order to change our fortunes we must first change ourselves, and that really means changing our habits.
We’re wired for the lives we have. We know this to be true because they’re the lives we are living. This does not mean that they’re the lives we were meant to have or anything that fatalistic, only that we keep doing the things that keep our realities in place.
One example that most of us have heard of is how many lottery winners wind up exactly where they started within a year or two of winning. This is because there is a certain comfort in what we know and we keep returning there no matter what happens.
In order to change our fortunes we must first change ourselves, and that really means changing our habits.
Here we’re focussing on internal habits, external ones will come later.
What that means is your thoughts and your emotions.
People become attached to their thoughts and believe that they’re fused to who they are as a person. For this exercise it’s helpful to see your thoughts as something external to you... something that you can have... or something that can have you. The same thing goes for your emotions.
Out of the womb we start linking beliefs (a.k.a. thoughts) and emotions to everything we encounter. Some things become forever scary because our two year old self reacted to something a certain way and we never completed the thought loop.
I’m showing my age with this next metaphor and I hope that everyone can follow me but thoughts can be imagined as a record that skips and restarts forever. In fact, it is believed that all thoughts will continue indefinitely until they are interrupted and rethought.
This is what we’re up to now. Taking on the habits of thought and emotion that will get you where you want to go by interrupting old thought patterns and replacing them with new ones.
If you want to be more fit, you have to think of yourself as fit. An athlete who breaks her leg will get mack in shape as soon as she’s cleared to walk again. Her self view is of someone in shape and anything but that seems weird.
When someone who is out of shape, a person who has always been out of shape, tries to become fit, a barrier they hit is that they see themselves as someone who is out shape. All actions become seen through the lens of “I’m doing something out of character”. Sometimes this is used to self-congratulate, “Look at me doing this thing that is so out of character! I’m really making progress” and that is seen as positive at the time. While not exactly negative, it does reinforce the belief that these behaviours are foreign to your experience and ultimately the scale will tip back to what’s familiar.
Making the shift to a different self view can seem false and delusional at first and this needs to be overcome. It is no more delusional to create a vision of yourself that inspires you and then set to consciously make it your “normal”, than it is to continue with a set of mental and emotional habits we picked up when we were still pre-verbal.
The concept of Self is too broad to go into now... the idea of an Observer that is able to see our thoughts and emotions...
For our purposes we have to be willing to let go of the past and embrace the future. New habits of thoughts and emotions will be key to this. Come back tomorrow when we’ll be looking at external habits.
Challenge:
-Identify as many old internal habits that are in need of an upgrade as possible.
-Come up with an upgraded version you’re going to replace it with.
(remember that you will have to push through the pain of implementing these for about three weeks before they’ll even start to take as new habits.)
What that means is your thoughts and your emotions.
People become attached to their thoughts and believe that they’re fused to who they are as a person. For this exercise it’s helpful to see your thoughts as something external to you... something that you can have... or something that can have you. The same thing goes for your emotions.
Out of the womb we start linking beliefs (a.k.a. thoughts) and emotions to everything we encounter. Some things become forever scary because our two year old self reacted to something a certain way and we never completed the thought loop.
I’m showing my age with this next metaphor and I hope that everyone can follow me but thoughts can be imagined as a record that skips and restarts forever. In fact, it is believed that all thoughts will continue indefinitely until they are interrupted and rethought.
This is what we’re up to now. Taking on the habits of thought and emotion that will get you where you want to go by interrupting old thought patterns and replacing them with new ones.
If you want to be more fit, you have to think of yourself as fit. An athlete who breaks her leg will get mack in shape as soon as she’s cleared to walk again. Her self view is of someone in shape and anything but that seems weird.
When someone who is out of shape, a person who has always been out of shape, tries to become fit, a barrier they hit is that they see themselves as someone who is out shape. All actions become seen through the lens of “I’m doing something out of character”. Sometimes this is used to self-congratulate, “Look at me doing this thing that is so out of character! I’m really making progress” and that is seen as positive at the time. While not exactly negative, it does reinforce the belief that these behaviours are foreign to your experience and ultimately the scale will tip back to what’s familiar.
Making the shift to a different self view can seem false and delusional at first and this needs to be overcome. It is no more delusional to create a vision of yourself that inspires you and then set to consciously make it your “normal”, than it is to continue with a set of mental and emotional habits we picked up when we were still pre-verbal.
The concept of Self is too broad to go into now... the idea of an Observer that is able to see our thoughts and emotions...
For our purposes we have to be willing to let go of the past and embrace the future. New habits of thoughts and emotions will be key to this. Come back tomorrow when we’ll be looking at external habits.
Challenge:
-Identify as many old internal habits that are in need of an upgrade as possible.
-Come up with an upgraded version you’re going to replace it with.
(remember that you will have to push through the pain of implementing these for about three weeks before they’ll even start to take as new habits.)