It’s that time of year again; the decorations have gone and the glass bottles have finaly made it to the recycling bin… we are now fully emersed in the Twenty Tens! So how many of us started this year having those obligatory News Year’s Resolutions? The tradition of which dates back to the early Babylonians whose most popular resolution was to return borrowed farm equipment!
A new year is a great opportunity for us to make some positive personal changes, break a few bad habits and embrace a few new healthy ones. Yet, by the end of January we all know that for most of us, that initial spark of change has well and truly gone out… but it’s not too late! Here are a few handy motivational tips from our friend Liggy Web at the Learning Architect:
In order to be really successful with regards to keeping your New Year resolutions, understanding habits and how they form is very useful.
Habits are at first cobwebs, and then they become cables —Spanish Proverb
Have you ever arrived at home or work with no memory of how you got there? When you started on your journey, you thought about the first few steps on that familiar path, but somewhere along the way, your brain moved onto more interesting topics, and the next thing you knew, you’d arrived. This is the essence of habits: once you start on a familiar series of actions, you stop thinking about them and you are able to complete them without conscious thought or attention. This can work in both a positive and negative way as it can free up our minds from dull or repetitive tasks, although it also makes it difficult to stop once we’ve started.
Over 90% of our daily routine is comprised of various habits that create our behaviours. What separates the positive and negative people is that the positive people have habits and behaviours that are conducive to success, while the negative people have ones that facilitate failure in their lives. Remember: you control your habits - they do not control you.
Your life is the culmination of all the daily behaviours that you have. You are where you are right now because of the behaviours that you have adopted in the past. It is important to identify which habits in your life lead to negative consequences and which lead to positive rewards. The difficulty in this sometimes has to do with instant gratification. If you change your habits, on occasions you’re not going to see an immediate effect. It is for this reason that people struggle with diets or can’t stop drinking, smoking, or spending money because they can’t control the instant gratification that is delivered.
Experts in hypnosis and NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming – which is the art and science of personal excellence) believe that it takes around 21 to 28 days to form the basis of a new habit or behaviour. The time it takes to replace an old one is inconclusive because it depends entirely on the person and how long they have owned the habit. Think of behaviour as a tree. One that is fairly new is like a young tree with short roots that you can pull straight from the ground. A behaviour that you have owned for many years is like an adult tree that has long roots that extend far underground.
Human beings tend to take actions to either move them closer to pleasure or away from pain. With that in mind, analyse your bad habits and dig for the underlying factors involved with them. Why do you eat so much? Why do you drink so much? Our behaviour lies in reason. Changing a harmful behaviour without addressing the root cause of the problem will only lead to a regression.
As with any newly learned behaviour, you may well experience some internal resistance for the first week or more. This is natural and it’s not going to be easy, so you have to mentally prepare for this challenge ahead of time. After you survive this first week, you will find that your new habit and behaviour becomes easier and easier to do and soon you don’t even have to think about doing it at all.
Stress is the primary cause of people reverting back to their old patterns of behaviour, so be wary of the level of stress in your life and know that a high amount can wipe away a new habit and make you revert back to your old ones.
How to Develop Good Habits
✓Challenge yourself and believe that you can do it.
✓ Identify exactly the specific habit that you would like to change.
✓ Make a list of all the benefits of breaking or adopting the habit.
✓Set yourself up for success by taking immediate action to change.
✓Tell people around you what you are trying to do.
✓Don’t give up. Failure is only a reality when you stop trying.
✓Keep a record of your progress and results.
✓Make sure you keep it up even when you have succeeded.
✓Be positive and open minded about change.
Make that Change for 2010
Remember ………..
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, or the most intelligent, but rather the one most adaptable to change —Charles Darwin
Thanks for this Liggy! I think i’m going to need all the help I can get for mine… I just have no will power when it comes to these sort of things!
I have faith with mine this year though… I only have one (so easier to manage) and it’s actually something I want to not need to! Wish me luck!
positive changes hypnosis…
Wow! Thank you! I always wanted to write in my site something like that. Can I take part of your post to my blog?…