SEVEN STEPS TO A NEW HABIT

Becoming A Person of Value

“Thoughts lead on to purposes; purposes go forth in action; actions form habits; habits decide character; and character fixes our destiny.” (Tryon Edwards)

 Fully 95% of everything you think, feel and do will be determined by your habits. The key to becoming a great person, and living a great life, is for you to develop the habits of success that lead inevitably to your achieving everything that is possible for you.

 

Fortunately, all habits are learned, and are therefore learnable. If  you have not yet developed the habits that you need to become everything that you are capable of becoming, you can develop these habits by a systematic process of practice and repetition, just as you learn any other subject.
 

A habit has been defined as “a conditioned response to stimuli,” but where do they originate? A habit is developed as the result of your responding in a particular way to a particular stimulus, often starting early in life. It is very much like driving down the road and taking a fork in one direction or another. Whichever direction you go, good or bad, largely determines where you end up.

 
Fortunately, you are born with no habits at all. You have acquired them all from infancy. Different habits take different time periods to develop, if you desire them, or to overcome, if they are habits that you want to get rid of. As it happens, there is a proven system that you can use to accelerate the process of new habit pattern development.

Behavioral psychologists refer to “operant conditioning” to describe how people learn certain automatic behaviors. They sometimes refer to the “SBC MODEL” of new habit pattern formation. These three letters stand for “Stimulus-BehaviorConsequences.” First, something happens in your life that stimulates a thought or feeling. Second, in response, you behave a particular way. Third, as a result, you experience a certain consequence. If you repeat this process often enough, you develop a new habit..
 
There is another model of habit pattern development called the “ABC Model.” These three letters stand for antecedents-behaviors-consequences. What psychologists have discovered is that the antecedents, what has happened in the past, stimulate only 15% of your behaviors. Fully 85% of your behaviors are motivated by what you expect to happen in the future, by the anticipatedconsequences. 
 

Suddenly, the thought of dying can be so intense or frightening that the individual immediately changes his diet, begins exercising, stops smoking and becomes a healthy and fit person. Psychologists refer to this as a “significant emotional experience,” or a “SEE.” Any experience of intense joy or pain, combined with a behavior, can create a habitual behavior pattern that may endure for the rest of a person’s life.

 

According to the experts, it takes about 21 days to form a habit pattern of medium complexity. By this, we mean simple habits such as getting up earlier at a specific hour, exercising each morning before you start out, listening to audio programs in your car, going to bed at a certain hour, being punctual for appointments, planning every day in advance, starting with your most important tasks each day, or completing your tasks before you start something else. These are habits of medium complexity that can be quite easily developed in 14-21 days through practice and repetition.

 

SEVEN STEPS TO A NEW HABIT

First, make a decision. Decide clearly that you are going to begin acting in a specific way 100% of the time, whenever that that behavior is required. For example, if you decide to arise early and exercise each morning, set your clock for a specific time, and when the alarm goes off, immediately get up, put on your exercise clothes and begin your exercise session. 

 

Second, never allow an exception to your new habit pattern during the formative stages. Don’t make excuses or rationalizations. Don’t let yourself off the hook. If you resolve to get up at 6:00 am each morning, discipline yourself to get up at 6:00 AM, every single morning until this becomes automatic.

 

Third, tell others that you are going to begin practicing a particular behavior. It is amazing how much more disciplined and determined you will become when you know that others are watching you to see if you have the willpower to follow through on your resolution.

 

Fourth, visualize yourself performing or behaving in a particular way in a particular situation. The more often you visualize and imagine yourself acting as if  you already had the new habit, the more rapidly this new behavior will be accepted by your subconscious mind and become automatic.

 

Fifth, create an affirmation that you repeat over and over to yourself. This repetition dramatically increases the speed at which you develop the new habit. For example, you can say something like; “I get up and get going immediately at 6:00 AM each morning!” Repeat these words the last thing before you fall asleep. In most cases, you will automatically wake up minutes before the alarm clock goes off, and soon you will need no alarm clock at all.

 

Sixth, resolve to persist in the new behavior until it is so automatic and easy that you actually feel uncomfortable when you do not do what you have decided to do.

 

Seventh, and most important, give yourself a reward of some kind for practicing in the new behavior. Each time you reward yourself, you reaffirm and reinforce the behavior. Soon you begin to associate, at an unconscious level, the pleasure of the reward with the behavior. You set up your own force field of positive consequences that you unconsciously look forward to as the result of engaging in the behavior or habit that you have decided upon.