New Year’s resolutions usually don’t work very well. The reason is that we often will pick a general life changing scenario liken “get more fit and healthy,” or “turn my finances around.” Or it could be a big specific thing like “quit smoking.”
What’s missing with this – which is why it’s not very effective – is that underlying these behaviors are habits. Often strong, long practiced habits. And a single behavior may include several habits.
To make effective changes in our lives, we must focus on the habits underlying the behavior, and create a plan of action for changing them, and to keep them changed over time.
That’s what we’ll be looking at today.
For most living creatures, instincts take charge of the necessary ordering which life requires: finding food, finding a mate, sleep cycles, protective behavior… But we humans are different in a fundamental way: our basic survival tool is our conscious mind, and unlike instinctual animals, we can choose to use our basic tool of survival… or not.
Because of this, we can do something pretty amazing: with our conscious minds, we train our own brains to hold the structure of our lives. We do this by creating habits. The habits we practice daily, weekly, monthly… are all maintained through neural pathways that we’ve established in our brain that make it easy and natural for us to follow these routines.
These habits – if they are good ones – help us to build a sense of meaning, purpose and direction. They are what allow us to persevere and reach long term goals. Without habits, we’d need to use our willpower for every single action we take.
The trouble is, we acquire many of our habits by default: from routines that our family valued and practiced, or that we learned in school, or from influential people in our lives… or from adapting to challenging circumstances as best we could.
This can be wonderful if the people we learned from all had good habits and great values, or when our adaptations have strengthened us. It can be awful if the habits we learned are awful.
But even in the best of circumstances – a loving family, a supportive community, great opportunities for learning, responsibility, and growth – the habits we learned earlier and that come easily to us may not be the best ones for our current and developing lives.
Many schools of psychotherapy have looked at the results of these habits, and concluded that when we are unhappy as adults, it’s in some way because of the mistakes, shortcomings, or bad behavior of parents or other important adults.
But what’s more important in the present is not so much to find who did what to us; it is to understand what we chose to do in response; what we’ve built into habits.
This is not about blaming ourselves or denying any awful experiences. A child is obviously not responsible for anything other people may have done to them – and children tend to blame themselves, particularly when what happened was truly horrible. So I want to be crystal clear here that I’m not suggesting that harmful events don’t matter; I’m talking about what we can do now, as adults, long after any harmful events happened.
But here’s where the leverage is: what we decided to do, even as a small child, when our decisions were nothing like an adult’s conscious choice, is what forms the basis for many of our deepest habits. These habits maintain the meaning we made of such circumstances back then; and it’s through recognizing and changing these habits that we can more easily get relief from the painful parts of our history.
We can’t change what actually happened in the past. But we can change the habits we made in response to those events. Our habits today are often echoes of our past; reverberations of what we experienced and decided way back then.
To start, it helps to look at our beliefs, because they often reflect decisions we made when we were younger, and around which we formed our enduring habits.
If we believe that money is the root of all evil, we may develop habits that keep us from making very much of it – because logically making money then becomes an act of evil, right? If we believe that marriage is a war, then we may create just that kind of marriage.
On the other hand, if we believe that money is created through creating value, and doing business is about everybody winning, then we may find that making money comes more easily to us. If we believe that a marriage is a team, a deep source of love and joy, then we may be more likely to create a marriage that reflects those positive qualities.
Our experiences lead us to form beliefs and make decisions, from which we develop habits that help us to deal with those experiences more automatically over time. Those habits, whether they’re good for us or bad for us today, endure until we decide to change them.
That is what can make harmful experiences so harmful over a lifetime; the tendency to maintain the same habits and behaviors that were adaptive back then but that may hurt us now.
To change our old habits, to update them into ones that work for our life today, we need three things.
- Bringing consciousness to the beliefs that are holding us back
- A goal and a plan to reach that goal
- Persistence in implementing that plan
The beliefs are the meaning and the framework in which our old habits exist. Pick an area of life that you’d like to improve – work, love, health, happiness – and spend some time reflecting on your beliefs about it. Be honest, and be curious.
Our beliefs create our context, and our biases: the part of the issue that we see most readily:
- If I believe that people are all untrustworthy, then I’ll see the examples that confirm that belief, and few that do not, and it’ll be hard for me to be close to the people in my life.
- If I believe that most people do their best, and that with goodwill and curiosity we create more trust as a relationship grows, we will see the opportunities to trust and to be trustworthy ourselves, and our relationships will be more likely to flourish.
Then the plan is crucial. Without a plan or a goal, you’ll certainly get somewhere, but whether it’s where you want to go is really up to chance. And the chance isn’t very high. I went into detail about how to do this in an earlier column, and its worth re-reading that one to design your plans.
It is the persistence – the regular action taken toward our goals – that allows us to establish the habits that will guide us to completion. Without persistence, our efforts will be haphazard, and we’ll be continually having to reassert our willpower against our old habits.
That’s frankly not likely to work; willpower gets fatigued, while the momentum of old habits is automatic – until we establish new ones.
It’s much more effective to use your precious willpower to create structures that will hold you to the new habits. For example: join an exercise class that you are accountable to attend; keep a daily log of your spending; create or join an accountability group where you support each other to reach your goals.
Framing new, healthier beliefs provides the meaning and motivation to change. Establishing a goal and a plan to reach that goal gives us the direction to aim for and the strategy for its execution…
But persistence is what builds the neural pathways in our brain, and the corresponding habits that are the expressions of our consciously chosen goals. When our beliefs are in alignment with our goals, we have a plan to reach those goals, and we are persistent with that plan, over time our habits will become our allies.
Then our habits will work for us to reach our goals, so that we don’t have to continually struggle against our habits.
PS: I’m currently expanding my life coaching practice. Go to my website to sign up for a free 30-minute initial conversation.
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