Habits

• What habits you create, create you.
• Grand Canyons of Belief
• Habits are laziness.
• The first 100 days
• What are your triggers? What are your rewards?
• Good habits are hard to form, and easy to live with. Bad habits are easy to form, and hard to live with.
• A choice becomes a discipline. A discipline becomes a habit. A habit becomes a temperament. A temperament becomes a personality trait. A personality trait is who you are.

Habits are the key to a successful, or unsuccessful life.

Our brains are fundamentally lazy, and we all have triggers in our behaviour that make us do or think certain things. When I’m driving, and pass a spot on the highway where I almost got into an accident, the same story triggers every time.  You know because you’ve heard that same story every time.

This happens in much smaller and less traumatic ways all day, every day.

We are exposed to different stimuli, and we react.

If we haven’t been trained how to react, we just go with our gut reaction. If whatever we did worked, we do that thing the next time, and the next, and the next.  This is a sign of efficiency, but it’s also a sign our brains are lazy.

So depending on your triggers, one of the reactions could be to do the least amount of work, or take a shortcut, or do the bare minimum.  When we do this, and it works, it becomes reinforced. Creating a habit.

You Create Your Habits, Then Your Habits Create You

The important thing you have to understand is you create your habits, but then over time your habits create you.

If your habit is to do nothing, sit on the couch, and eat donuts. That’s what you’ll do. The result of this habit will create weight gain, and potentially compromise your health. However if you get up, and get some exercise, your habits will create a healthier you. The best part about it is it just takes one decision, and then your habits do the rest.

Triggers

There are great books written about habits, and the first key is to know what your triggers are.

What in your environment triggers your behaviour in a certain way? Is it a feeling of hunger? So you grab a donut? Is the trigger a reaction to something that happens, and so you tell yourself a story that causes you to do something? If you find yourself doing something less than ideal over and over again, work it backwards, and understand what your trigger is.

Rewards

Once you have your trigger, what is the reward that follows?

That donut sure does taste good. That story you tell yourself sure is convincing, and you knew it all along that that was going to happen! Understand the reward, and think of something else that will reward you.

The thing you have to understand is we all get triggered. So what you can control is the behaviour that follows.  It’s not impossible, it just takes a little bit of time.  For me, the hardest part about trying to change the habit is the first 100 days.  That’s how long it takes to form a new habit.

The First 100 Days

Let me walk you through the process.

Let’s say you have a trigger that makes you want to eat a donut, but instead you will use that to exercise.  The first time your exercise, you’ve created a new behaviour, and the first few days or times it’s relatively easy.  Trigger, new behaviour. But after a while, you feel tempted to go back to the old behaviour. It’s easier. It feels better. It’s more natural.

Think of it like a river. At first, a river just flowing along the surface. But over time, the more the river flows in one way, over that same place, it starts to move the earth, and cut down into the ground creating a valley. Over time those valleys get deeper and deeper, the path of the river is harder and harder to change.

This is the same for habits and behaviour. Once it starts to move in the same direction, over and over again, it digs a path in your brain, and becomes ingrained in you. Eventually digging a canyon that is hard to get out of.

But the best part is, you can change it, and here’s what eventually happens.

First, you can make a choice, and if you continue to make that same choice over and over again, it slowly becomes a behaviour. That behaviour if carried on long enough, starts to becomes a habit. The interesting thing is what happens next.

Over time, that habit becomes a temperament, and over even longer periods of time that temperament becomes a personality trait.  Who you are is the sum of your personality traits, so technically by changing your habits, you change who you are.

I Am

For me a personality trait is something where you say ‘I am’. ‘I am disciplined.’ ‘I am smart.’ ‘I am capable’, or whatever you put after ‘I am’.  You make a choice, that becomes a behaviour, that becomes a habit, that becomes a temperament, that becomes a personality trait, and that defines who you are.

Just one last thing to bear one thing in mind when you’re going through the process: Good habits are hard to form, but they make life easy. Bad habits are easy to form, but make life hard.

Choose good habits, and your life will be easy.