It’s that time of year when people begin preparing their New Year’s Resolutions. New Year’s Resolutions are essentially renunciations of old habits you have been trying to break unsuccessfully for at least the last twelve-months. Before I provide you proven strategies to promote your success, I want to review some background on the dynamics of habit.
A habit is a thing done often, usually done easily – a practice, custom, or act that is acquired and is integrated into your behavior no longer requiring conscious effort. How long does a behavior have to be repeated before it is considered a habit? The simple answer is until it has enslaved or mastered you. One truth about habits is they possess us, you do not have habits, they have you.
These conditioned responses appear to disappear by disuse; however, habits can never be entirely unlearned. As with long-term memory, well-established habits and habit pathways do not disappear with time. Do you really think it is possible to forget knowing how to ride a bicycle?
Life is more about better and better management not about cure.
The earlier in life a habit is formed the more enduring it will become. Self-destructive habits are easier to learn, provide quicker rewards, require few delays in gratification, and less disciplined determination and self-sacrifice than self-enhancing habits. Remember rewards reinforce behavior. Self-destructive habits are more difficult to modify or correct for the simple reason that their existence is denied – denial being the insistence that what is, isn’t. Remember, what you don’t acknowledge lives with you until you do.
Although it is impossible to cure yourself of a habit they can be managed. Here are the strategies to make management possible.
1. Stop Rationalizing.
“I can’t change; You can’t teach an old dog new tricks; That’s just me; After all nobody is perfect.” The truth is you can teach any old dog any new trick if you make the rewards important enough.
2. Apply a Strategy.
Review my article on “The Five Commandments”.
3. Be Realistic.
Learning to manage an old habit won’t happen fast nor will your resolve be consistent. Remember, periodic failures are better than habitual slavery.
4. Be Encouraged.
Enthusiasm and encouragement strengthens self-discipline and prompts an attitude of stick-to-itiveness. Remember, you can change the past. What is today tomorrow? The past. Change what you do today and you have changed the past.
5. Get Better at Recovery.
Learn to measure maturity by how quickly you recover. Along with accepting the difficulty of learning to manage old habits, you must accept the fact that you are imperfect, and prone to make mistakes. There is nothing sacred about any starting point. When you slip back into an old habit the quicker you can recover the better managed that habit will become, until one day you will recover so quickly it will appear seamless.
6. Don’t Put Yourself In Tempting Situations.
Learning to manage old habits or acquiring new ones is harder at the beginning. Therefore, the wise person doesn’t put himself or herself in tempting situations that risk sabotaging your new strategy.
7. Focus on Trying, Not on Succeeding.
You make your goals or risks too difficult to take when you over focus on the outcome. Doing so will inhibit your progress. A successful strategy focuses on the process of trying to succeed. Pay attention to the efforts you are extending and the steps you are taking. The essence of well-established habits is psychological rigidity. Therefore, absolutely fundamental to successfully managing old habits or acquiring new ones are flexibility and slowly driving towards your objective – managing life.
Wishing you the best from every strategic risk.
