We all have one. The huge, unwanted habit that sits in the corner of the room, like an ugly little troll, jabbing its finger our way and sneering “You’ll never get rid of me!” It hands you another fag, or a doughnut, or a coffee. It pushes the snooze button on your alarm in the morning when you wanted to go jogging. It hypnotizes you into handing over your credit card when you know you should be saving your money.
Ugly, unwanted and bad. The habit you really, really want to kick out of the house.
But it’s easier said than done, right?
You’ve tried pushing the ugly bugger out of the door step by step, nudging its wrinkly body across the floor a little bit further every day. But after all your hard work, one morning you wake up and discover the troll has sneaked back to its dark and smelly corner while you were nodding off.
Make no mistake, changing an unwanted habit is not easy. A really big habit tends to build its own robust support system to keep it alive – a home inside your head – and cutting it out of your life for good can be as futile as trying to evict the walls of your house.
You don’t want to use the slowly, slowly approach for this horrible beastie. You want massive and immediate action to kick the vile monster out of your life and on to the street for good.
So what is the secret to hacking your biggest and baddest habit?
I call it The Seesaw. (Your troll will call it “The Seesaw of Death”).
Imagine your horrible habit, the one you want to ditch NOW, sitting on one end of a seesaw. The bigger and nastier the habit, the heavier it is.
Now imagine yourself on the other end of the seesaw. To shift this habit you need to get heavy. You need momentum and as much power as you can gather.
What you need is a big, weighty, urgent and seriously compelling reason for change. You have to come up with a “why” that is bigger, more powerful and more insistent than the grasp your ugly habit currently has on you.
The key to making any big change is not the change itself, but the power of the intention behind it.
We all do things for a reason, whether we understand this reason or not. Depending on our own level of self-awareness, we are getting emotional and psychological “pay backs” for everything we say, think or do. Your ugly little troll is only there because it is reinforcing something you strongly believe about life, about yourself and other people. If you’ve been listening to your troll for a long time, it’s hard to believe anyone else.
So it’s time to STOP listening to your troll and start rehearsing a “why” that is big enough to outweigh the bad habit. It can be the positive, uplifting kind of why that gives you pleasure, excitement and hope, such as “I choose to live a smoke-free life so I can live longer, breathe easier, and see my grandchildren grow up”. This is my preferred method as it’s uplifting and positive and creates an added feeling of gratitude.
Or you may find it more compelling to choose a why that invokes potential pain by asking yourself “What horrible disease will I be suffering from in 10 years time if I don’t change this habit?” Do this with imagination and really visualize your potential future – it will give you a powerful and even frightening image to run away from.
Making a drastic and dramatic change is really straightforward. Most of us just haven’t given ourselves an irresistible enough reason to make the change in the first place.
The bigger and more drastic the change you want to make, the more compelling and urgent your “why” needs to be! USE the leverage of the seesaw to act FAST and eject your vile little squatter of a bad habit forever.
What empowering and magnetic reason can you choose right now?
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