I’ve written about the reboot before. Subconsciously we do almost everything on auto pilot. Including our worst behaviors. Hard to change that when you don’t really stop to think about it and dig in to change yourself. It’s not the mistake that’s bad. It’s the chain of self-destruction when we continue to make that bad habit happen over and over again that’s unforgivable. In our work lives it’s called a career killer.
We need to take a break from what we do good, to really understand what we can do great. – Me
We really have two selves that dictate our actions. Getting comfortable and really close with the two selves, will serve us incredibly well. The first one is our automatic selves, the one that acts with out our direct control. It’s what influences you to sit on the couch and binge a new Netflix series. The second one is your conscious self which uses rational thought and reason to move forward. When I decided to try to run a marathon for the first time, that was my conscious self that was in charge.
Believe it or not, it has been proven we can physically change our brains. You can direct the way the brain develops and how it affects your behaviors. So what we need to get really great at is not letting our automatic self cause us to slip. We have to bolster up and work on amping our conscious self to be the dominant way we choose next.
Focus on developing some really great habits to replace the bad ones to start. What are they? What do they look like? How do they feel? Then a simple way you can start impacting bad ones (now you know what good feels like) is look at your automatic habits that are negative and make them positive ones. We know the more we practice and execute a certain habit, the more it slips into a place that our automatic self takes over. With that in mind, each time you engage a bad habit, you make it much more likely that you will do it again and again.
We have certain bad habits that we deem okay, because they have self-serving values added to them. This bias of course affects how we see things around us in our work and life. We have to keep that bias in the front of our mind. It’s possible that the bias could be holding us back from moving forward with the change we want to see. If we continue to allow the bad bias to control us, we will let it override our conscious focus for positive change. We will be convinced the world is to blame for our bad habits instead of taking the ownership ourselves.
We discussed our two selves and how our automatic selves can rewire our brains the wrong way. We might not at that point be able to pull ourselves out with out some very strong focus and feedback. We need to practice mindfulness and ask for help to see the right way to overcome our worst engrained bad habits. You’re overall goal should be to find ways to increase your self-control (controlled by your conscious self) and strengthen that willpower. I’ll end with this:
Get to know yourself with compassionate curiosity.
We don’t think about compassionate approaches in ourselves, with ourselves. We often try to show compassion towards others, not self. Flip it. Stay dedicated and your bad habits will disappear. Know yourself. Your conscious self will thank you.
Have a great rest of the week!
✌🏻Shawn
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