Breaking Bad Habits? Welcome To Habit Exchange!

Breaking bad habits is a central self-motivation skill to develop on the road to self improvement and personal growth. Effective habits facilitate our progress. Detrimental habits hold us back. On the road of effort that stretches between our old ways and the new ways we want to acquire - we grow ourselves strong.

The Double-Edged Sword Of Habit

“A habit is something you can do without thinking – which is why most of us have so many of them.”

~Frank A. Clark

The nature of habit is such that it facilitates automatic functioning. When a behavior or thought become habitual, we no longer need to pay conscious attention to it. It happens automatically.

This is both good news and bad.

It's good news when our habits compliment our effectiveness and take us where we want to go. In this scenario it's great to have the habit mechanism on auto-pilot, working to our benefit. With good habits on our side, we're free to focus our attention on whatever task is at hand. We stride powerfully towards our goals.

The bad news is when we aim at breaking bad habits. The automatic nature of habits make them tricky to change. Conscious intervention is needed. We need to take the helm and steer a fresh course. Actions and habits are the second stepping stone of out-of-the-mind self improvement and motivation.

Welcome to the challenge of positive change. Welcome to the challenge of breaking bad habits.

Welcome To Habit Exchange!

One of the most powerful techniques for breaking bad habits is to not only focus on eliminating the unwanted habit, but decide to replace it with a wanted habit instead. In other words, you fill the vacuum that would normally be created by dropping a significant habit from your life - with a positive alternative. You don't leave so much as a hairs-breadth gap between ending your old habit and starting the new one.

For example, many people worry that if they stop smoking they will gain weight. Research seems to support this worry, making it a real, rather than an imagined, concern. Having this concern can be powerfully demotivating in your efforts to quit smoking, unless you deliberately want to put on weight?! Not likely.

So what you set-out to do is to replace your habit of smoking with a habit of exercising, for example. You channel all of your nervous energy (resulting from refraining from smoking) into physical activity, with the added benefit that you eliminate the concern for gaining weight. There are many other psychological and physical benefits that come with exercise that will fortify your strength against bad habits.

This is what habit exchange is all about. This is the place where you can actually set out to do it. You will identify the habit you want to eliminate and the habit you want to cultivate in it's place. You will outline a short, yet powerful plan for installing the new habit to replace the old one. You will record your progress here and get feedback from me or others.

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