HARNESSING YOUR HABITS

PsychTools for Every Day Success

Eat right. Exercise. Take Geritol. Stop biting your fingernails. Be more organized. Work smarter. (Do I sound like your mother?) If I could wave my magic wand and you instantly changed every bad habit, and mastered every effective habit, would you take me up on it? Sounds like snake oil, doesn’t it?  And yet you got those habits somehow, right? You learned that annoying pattern of avoiding unpleasant tasks until someone’s screaming at you, or taking your gym bag to work once again, only to toss it in the trunk on your way to Wendy’s for lunch. What was your New Year’s resolution by the way? If it was to save money or lose weight, you’re in the vast majority. And you’ll still be in the majority on December 31^st, 2000 when you take one more drink and promise to do better in 2001.

THE  HABIT  TRAP

Most people still struggle with habits that plagued them 20 years ago. It seems to be the human condition to struggle with all kinds of habits, from habits of the head (‘I can’t do that – what if I screwed up?’ or ‘There’s no way I can get all this done’), to habits of the hands (smoking, eating, etc.) Even sleeping poorly, procrastination, and forgetting are habits waiting to be broken.

Steven Covey in Seven Habits of Highly Effective People pounded it into our heads – habits make or break success. But how do you break the cycle? Or better yet, how do you gain the habits that lead to success? Covey set the destination, but we need a road map – concrete tools - telling us how to get there.

You have a natural ability to master habits. I know this because you’re human. And if you argue that point, you have bigger hurdles than mastering habits. Every human has habits. Even if you’re very unorganized, and like variety (or out and out chaos), you’re still a creature of habit. If you’re raising kids watch them. They thrive in a routine, almost deadly predictable environment, because on a very basic level we don’t like change. We realize life is loony and strange, and we’d like to know what’s around the next corner. The peephole in your front door helps reduce stress of the unknown: is it a land shark knocking, waiting to swallow me whole? Or is it my granny in pastel paisley coming to take me to tea? That’s why habits are necessary; they give us predictable, safe feelings of being in control of a little chunk of an otherwise loopy world.

THE  CHALLENGE

So are your habits controlling you, or do you use them to get what you want? In my seminar, PsychTools for Mastering Habits, I’ll teach you simple, do-able tools for breaking or creating habits, but you need some information first. Three quick tools to try before my talk: ask around, ask inside, and prioritize.

A client walked into my office and said, ‘People don’t like me.’ Hmmmm, I said. Why? ‘I don’t know. I’m nice to them. I say nice things. But people take a long time to warm up to me, and I’m often lonely.’ I stopped the session and asked permission to videotape. The next week that woman bounded into my office, hugging that videotape. ‘I never knew!’ she said. No one had ever told you?, I asked. And she reported remembering several times, even in grade school, when people had commented on it, but she had dismissed it. The video showed it: her natural, resting face was a cartoonish scowl. Her habit of frowning had drawn lines in a relatively young face, and she still didn’t realize her insides and her outsides didn’t match – she was coming across as a spinstress schoolmarm, even when she felt happy inside! Other people will sometimes tell you your bad habits, or comment on the habits you need but don’t have. It’s our fault for not asking, and not listening when the information comes. Try this experiment: ask three close friends or family members what three habits you need to master, and which three habits get in your way.

One client of mine hated a co-worker, and spent a lot of therapy dollars venting and strategizing ways to deal with this difficult person. I noticed she had a common habit of not looking at me when I was giving her difficult feedback. She would look away, pick at her hands, or even close her eyes. I asked her if she looked at this difficult co-worker, and she responded, yes – of course. I asked her to watch. She thought I was odd, but I am so that’s okay, and she went away.

The next week she came through the door with a sheepish grin, and said she found it very difficult to look at someone she was in conflict with. Ah, ha! What do you lose when you don’t look at someone? You lose all the subtle non-verbals that make up (depending on who you read) 85 – 90% of all communication. This difficult co-worker had a very shrill, parental voice, but her non-verbals were kind and compassionate. My client took the challenge of simply changing the habit her eyes were in, and she reported becoming friends with her adversary in a few weeks. My client wasn’t even aware of her habit to avoid eye contact in difficult situations, until an outside observer pointed it out. Ask people who will tell you the truth about your habits.

Ask inside is similar, but you become your own video camera. Watch two things: your thoughts, and your actions. Some people like to keep a short journal at the end of the day, capturing thought and action, so they can see patterns emerge. Also, ask yourself what three habits you want, and which three you’d like to leave behind. Then take one habit a week, and just live life watching to see how things would be different if you enhanced or erased that habit. Don’t change anything; just contemplate how life would be better. I’ll tell you in the seminar why this experiment has actually helped you change and you didn’t even know it.

         Prioritize. You can change any habit in 21 days, but there’s a catch: you can only work on one habit at a time. So take a look at the information you gathered from outside sources, and from your internal study, and pick the top five. For overachieving, type-A folks, this may be distasteful, but if you are in the habit of overwhelming your schedule, maybe that’s one of the first habits to tackle! Don’t set yourself up to fail by taking on more than the human brain can handle. Try to change every habit you have, and your brain will blow up. That’s fairly messy, plus my liability policy doesn’t cover audience’s heads blowing up.

THE  END  -- UNTIL THE SEMINAR

Will you be a perfect person after the Mastering Your Habits speech? Probably not. Will you walk in with the great pre-tool of solid data about your habits, and walk out with concrete tools to change those you don’t want and master those you need? Definitely. Your habits often define you; they can make or break careers and marriages. They’re slippery little buggers, so join me in the quest for habit mastery, and we’ll learn how to make them serve us, instead of being slaves to another broken New Year’s resolution.

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