Using the Power of Habit – Are You Doing It Wrong?

I read a lot of books. Most people don’t read these days which is a damn shame. OK, I’ll admit I went through a dry spell for a good block of time where I didn’t read anything that wasn’t force fed to me in Junior High and High School, but luckily for me I got back on the horse in college. I love to read books about psychology and thinking. I am a deep diver when I get into a topic of interest and this is both a blessing and a curse. I get fixated on whatever is in my cross-hairs. Always have, and this has pushed me into some pretty negative thought patterns in my day. I have inadvertently set a handful of bad habits this way which had to be undone later on. Most (close to all) of the unhappiness in my life, both past and present, has come from me not maintaining control of the voice in my head and allowing it to set bad habits in my way of thinking.

I talk about that “voice in your head” quite a bit because that voice in your head is what governs the way you perceive your personal reality. Your “reality” that you experience is 100% subjective. No two people share the same exact reality. Quantum physics even tells us that there isn’t even such a thing as a solid matter “Reality” with a capital R. There are only billions of “realities” (lower case r) rendered to each of us as we observe what is going on in our environment. Five honest people could witness the same car crash and give five completely different accounts to the police of how it played out. Each of them would believe their own account enough to pass a polygraph. So who’s right? We have to let the judge and jury decide. But wait, even their views are completely subjective.

You don’t attract what you WANT. Wants are intellectual in nature. Wants are in your conscious mind. You attract what you are in harmony with, what you ARE. And you ARE the sum total of your thoughts that become fixed in your subconscious mind.

-Bob Proctor

The fact is we usually have little to no control over anything that happens around us in our life.  We can exert a certain amount of control over our physical surroundings and we can manipulate people around us to a certain degree with some effort (if your into that sort of thing), but there is only one thing you can control. That is the way you respond. Lets face it, SHIT HAPPENS and you get to deal with it. Your habits of thinking directly govern how you respond. How you respond to things and the story you tell yourself in your own head is what determines your quality of life.

Humans like all other animals are creatures of habit. But what exactly is a habit? Simply put, a habit is a usual way of behaving. Something that an organism does often in a regular and repeated way. Getting more into it, Merriam-Webster’s medical definition says a habit is “an acquired mode of behavior that has become nearly or completely involuntary by frequent repetition or physiological exposure.” Our subconscious mind functions totally on habit.

When we DO or THINK anything repeatedly our subconscious mind literally takes in the program just like a computer and then acts it out automatically without any further conscious effort. This goes for anything that you repeat enough times whether it is beneficial or detrimental to your quality of life. This is why it is so important to become aware of our inner thought processes and conduct routine audits. It’s tough, but it’s so important if you want to make any sort of change to your lifestyle. Any change that you attempt to make in your way of living whether it be physical, mental, or spiritual HAS to be a change made at the subconscious level. You must make it a lifestyle change that you repeat for long enough to adequately “program” it into the subconscious mind.  You must make it an automatic way of being otherwise you will go right back to the undesired state.

The chains of habit are often too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.

-Warren Buffett

I like the way Earl Nightengale talks about the subconscious mind as a garden. The garden will grow any seed you plant in the fertile soil whether the plant be a medicinal herb or a deadly poison. The garden will return whatever you plant, but it doesn’t care what you plant. A garden will also go to weed and be eaten by intruders rather quickly if you don’t properly protect and tend it. This is why it is of utmost importance to make sure you are only planting what you WANT to see grow up tall and bear fruit. Only set habits that will be beneficial to our quality of life and lead to our physical, mental, and spiritual advancement. All three of these go hand in hand and they all work with the same universal habit force.

I was listening to a lecture last week that almost brought me to tears because of how beautifully the person talked about how we can grow up and set a habit of being more spiritual in our daily life. It wasn’t anything that I expected but it was so true. I don’t even know the man’s name that was speaking but it doesn’t matter. Even a bum on the street could have said it and it would be every bit as true. When something eloquently put rings true and resonates with your soul the source doesn’t really matter. All that matters is the value you gain from it.

What he said was that a person who is very spiritual is a person that you can’t even tell is spiritual. One that simply walks around balanced and knows who they are. Someone that doesn’t have to yell it from the tree tops. One that can simply walk from place to place and be peaceful; not in fear. Comfortable all the time because they know who they are. Balanced, all the time. Compassionate, all the time. Slow to anger, slow to be irritated, willing to listen. That is the evolution of spirituality in a human being. These are the kinds of habits that we should really be setting. Habits that help us grow up at the “being” level.

Have an amazing rest of the week and remember… keep evolving a little every day in every way.