Positive Habits for Turbo Thinkers©

I just can’t do it. See? I’m back to my old self. I wasn’t meant to do this. I’ve failed yet again.

Sometimes we have a brilliant insight and inspiration to turn an idea into a reality. We decide to start fresh and proclaim to begin a new habit. We begin with enthusiasm, full of energy and optimism. We start off great...and then we fail. How easy is it to fall into our black and white thinking! We can’t execute perfectly, thus we suck. Would we tell this to our best friend? To our loved ones?

In creating new habits, we are forging new neural pathways. It is like going into the jungle of our brains with a machete, trying to clear a trail and then expecting to find it like a mowed tennis lawn the next time we go on a walk. How can we remember that creating a new habit will require both practice and patience with ourselves? We can take small, incremental steps, always measuring ourselves against our previous success. 

For example, though far from 100%, a score of 40% is still double the improvement of my previous 20% score! We can create reminders to get ourselves back on track. After all, our working memories don’t always work, do they? We can anticipate distractions and setbacks, and create prevention plans. 

Another example is I can set out my exercise clothes the night before and turn my phone on only after my workout. We can create more realistic expectations of ourselves, considering our energy and resources at the time. I see creating a new habit as nothing more than a fascinating scientific experiment. I have a hypothesis and I am going to test it out. All along, I am gathering data. I am deciding what small variable needs to change to improve the results. With curiosity, I explore what I have learned. Two quotes come to mind. One from Thomas Edison:

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.

And one from Michael Jordan:

I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.

Can you imagine if Edison had given up and declared, “I just can’t do it.”? Or if Michael Jordan had sighed, “I’ve failed yet again.” and quit? Yet why do we accept this type of language when speaking of ourselves? How can we turn around our thinking and our self-talk? How can we find the ability to pause and catch ourselves? To observe, feel the emotion, and make the decision to move on? To realize that we do have a choice? We have free will. We have the ability to redirect our thoughts, let go of that which doesn’t serve us, and take action in alignment with our purpose. We can persevere.