There are the obvious bad habits: vices and diets that are bad for your health; not getting enough sleep; sleeping too much; lack of exercise, the usual suspects.
Then there are the bad habits that can be insidious, like not keeping your word: to yourself or to others.
What’s that all about?
That could be a couple of things. It’s not understanding how important whatever the issue is that you neglected. It’s also disrespect of the other person and yourself.
But mostly, it’s just pure habit.
Like I’ve said before, we’re all freaking robots. The minute we’re born we’re a spiritual person who accepts the conditioning of a personality. Our mind is an empty place. It’s a brain that’s just a file cabinet waiting to be filled up. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t have a brain that was so adaptive to learning.
A lot of the things we learn isn’t about good or bad. It’s about the way that we learned them. They’re either helpful or not depending on what we want to do.
Now what do you do as a robot? If the robot is not keeping its word, do you beat it up? No. You just need to change the programming. You need to teach the robot something else to do.
How do you do that?
First of all, the robot is very good at understanding an awareness of the process that says, “Robot, we’re not keeping our word, and we would feel better if we kept our word, so we want to do that. Will you buy in with me?” Of course it’s going to say, “Yes.”
You plead with your robot again, “From here on out, we’re going to do that, right, robot?” The robot will say, “Sure,” but you know what happens the next day. The robot just does what it was programmed to do, doesn’t it?
What do you do? You gotta give the robot not a drastic change in programming, but an easy one.
You say, “Robot, do you think you have the capability of keeping your word one time?” The robot says, “That’s easy. I can do that.”
Robots like really easy things. You go ahead and keep your word, and you do it with intentionality.
Then you say to your inner robot, “You felt so good about that, do you think you might be able to do one more?”
“I could do one more. Of course I could!”
Now it’s just a question of memory and saying that when you say you’ll do it, you do it.
You must replace a habit with another habit, but you’re a robot. You have to take on one thing at one time. Then you learn another thing one time and then another thing one time.
Don’t say, “I’m going to commit for 30 days.” You’re going to set yourself up for failure. Why? It’s because you’re a frickin’ robot. If you’ve been running another program for X amount of years, 30 days of new momentum is outstanding, not something that just “happens.”
Make it long-term goal in the back of your head. For now it’s one step at a time, one day at a time.
Now, what if you don’t keep your word on this one particular new habit, or you don’t do your new habit for even one day?
You take a nice deep breath and say, “Thank you for doing the best you could today. You did not complete what you said you would. Would you be willing to commit for tomorrow?
It’s okay. It’s a habit. We’re going to take a little bit of time to reverse this habit. You’re literally pressing your robot’s restart button. Robots do what they do. They should always get another chance.
Hey, I’m the first guy in line to give tough love when it’s needed by my students. That’s what your teachers and mentors are for sometimes. But for goodness sake don’t beat yourself up about habits that are tough to change. We’re born this way.
But we’re also creative enough, imbued with gifts that allow us to create new paths, new ways of being. Kind self-accountability is what we’re looking for here. There are enough people in the world who are eager to beat us up, especially when we’re successful. Don’t do it to yourself.
Take on your transformations one at a time, one step at a time, and watch just how easy it can be to change bad habits.
