Every year the same procedure: people make New Years Resolutions and pretty quickly fail them. Stop Smoking? Get fitter? Get smarter, nicer … whatever …
It’s basically willpower versus habit.
But most of us have not especially well trained mind or huge amounts of willpower to overcome intellectual, emotional or physical bad habits or even addictions.
The old mental image of the well trodden path is the best way to explain why resolution most of the time fail.
Bad habits as well as good ones are psychic or physical patterns we repeat. The more established and familiar the pattern is – the easier we can repeat it.
I will change … of at least I’ll try and fail like last years and the year before …
It’s like any skill or behaviour: the more you practice that habit the deeper it is ingrained in your psyche or body. Like reading or throwing a Frisbee practice makes perfect or creates a hellish habit that is harder and harder to escape.
Often we follow these well trodden paths on auto pilot. We can observe ourselves often doing stupid or terrible things to ourselves – often in full knowledge and awareness that we are doing it RIGHT NOW.
The bad habit has embedded itself so deeply into our psyche or body that we can follow it blindly and are zombies of something we more and more hate.
Do you really think you simply can stop such a bad habit but saying to yourself I will change? You already have the awareness you are doing something bad while you are doing it – and you are unable to stop yourself while doing it!
The strategy to simply make a resolution will mostly fail. It is the wrong "tool" to escape from the "bad path" in your psyche!
How will escape a bad "path" if you don’t have a new one?
So you failed again? Understand the power of bad patterns before you try to change …
Imagine being a Jogger and you have a course you have been running for years. You know every inch of the way, the timing, your own capabilities and each obstacle. But also the pleasure of that very course …
A new course is to be learned through practice and experiencing it again and again. The same applies to retraining new patterns in your behaviour.
Instead of wasting a lot of time and energy to fight a bad old pattern, pour these resources into creating and strengthening a new one. It will help your "self improvement" more to experience (small) successes instead of constant and well ingrained failures.
Be patient! Be persistent!
Oh sweet sweet fucking success!
To build new patterns takes time. Failures will happen and that’s a good thing too. You can use these "failures" to measure how well the new pattern is already established. Obviously over time you should less and less fall back to bad old behaviour …
