Your Self Improvement Blog

We all have bad habits that we would like to give up – but the point of this short article is that all habits are bad! Sure, you might have heard of books like “The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People” or even the sequel about the eighth habit! – but there’s no such thing as a good habit. If you stop to think about it for a moment, everything that you do is done habitually – from brushing your teeth to the way that your dress yourself, to driving your car, to saying “Hi” to the same people every day. Your life is one long string of habits – and, of course, that’s no bad thing – God knows rush-hour traffic is bad enough without us all having to learn how to drive all over again every morning!

However, the big problem with habitual behaviour is that our minds are very cleverly designed to enable us perform our routine tasks without paying any attention to them. “Great! That means that I can think about the day ahead while driving to work” (but the majority of accidents take place within a short distance from home because of this kind of behaviour) or “I can mentally run through my To Do List while I’m having my shower!” (many people tell me that doing this stresses them out before they ever get to work).

Habitual behaviour poses a huge problem for you and me, because we pay what we’re doing no attention, our subconscious mind wanders – and it habitually wanders to the same place – the dim and distant past where you were burdened with the baggage that you’ve been dragging around all your adult life. As a matter of course, this is where your subconscious mind lives – amongst the old photos of the childhood events that lead you, now in your adult life, into believing that you’re inadequate, or stupid, or a failure, or stressed out. Your childhood thoughts are mugging you every single day of your adult life and you’re not even aware of it. Why? Because, having got so used to not having to pay attention to your habitual tasks, you’ve got into the habit of paying attention to nothing at all – and that’s a scientific fact. This is seriously bad news for us – because psychology confirms that our ability to be happy and successful is related to our ability to pay attention – and we can’t do it!
What all this means is that, if you want to change your life, you’ve got to start doing all the little things that you do everyday – differently. Tonight, brush your teeth with the hand that you’ve never brushed your teeth with – if you already do the two different sides of your mouth with the opposite hand, switch! When you’re getting dressed, put the “other leg” into your pants first, the “other arm” into your shirt or top. Have something different for breakfast (a friend recently realized that he’s had the same cereal for breakfast for the last fifteen years!) And forget your regular low-fat latte – be adventurous. Do something different for lunch (one of my clients told me that some work colleagues ate in the staff canteen, sitting at the same table, in the same chair, every single day for forty years!)

You’ll be amazed at the benefit of doing little things differently. First of all, you’ll realize that, in everything that you do in life (and that includes the really big stuff) you can choose – this comes as big news to everybody when they first realize it! Secondly, because you’ll be doing your habitual tasks differently, you’ll have to pay them more attention than the none that you normally pay. In other words, you’re going to start learning how to pay attention – the key to happiness and success.

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