Change Your Life: Living Skillfully

Habits can be our enemies – but they can also be our friends. Positive habits and regular practices are the path to effective, long-term change. In this post I want to look at 10 ways to build a positive practice.

These 10 ways are inspired by the last chapter of Robert Emmons’ book Thanks!: How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier, which I just finished reading. (That’s an affiliate link. If you buy from it, I get a tiny amount of money.)

I’ve split one of his practices into two, dropped another, renamed most of them and generalised them from his focus on cultivating gratitude, which is why I say “inspired by”. It’s an inspiring book, and you can read my review on Goodreads.

1. Keep Track

Keeping a daily journal, whether it’s in a notebook by your bed, a digital voice recorder, a blog or even a video diary, creates, as Emmons puts it, “a daily habit of paying attention to important… events”. We’re talking here about both inner and outer events, or rather, both outer events and your responses to them. With a goal in mind, your perceptions of the events can start to shift, and your behaviour is likely to shift also in the direction of your goal.

photo credit: jessica.garro

2. Look Back

I don’t know if you’ve ever been on a walk and, after struggling up a hill, paused and looked back and been amazed by how far you’ve come? Reviewing your progress is a good way to remind yourself that you are making progress, and to motivate yourself to go further.

3. Ask Yourself Questions

Good, thought-provoking questions prompt introspection, and help you to both shift your perspective and show you how far you’ve come (and perhaps where you need to go next). Good questions might include:

• How do I feel about my goal now?
• Where did this pattern start?
• Am I ready to let go of this?

4. Shape Your Thoughts

Liturgies, litanies, prayers, affirmations… All these are among the traditional means of shaping your thinking by memorable, often poetic sequences of words that lead in a desired direction. At its negative extreme, of course, this becomes propaganda or brainwashing, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. If you choose for yourself a form of words that reflects your genuine aspirations, your habitual thoughts, feelings and behaviours will follow as you repeat, recite, and even chant them to yourself day after day.

5. Come To Your Senses

Dissociation from our bodies and the world around us is the Western norm. Reconnecting to our bodies and the world is, I firmly believe, one of the surest pathways to good mental, physical and social health.

Here’s a brilliant little game a friend of mine plays with her children, who are all preschoolers. It’s called the Now Game. All you do is say a sentence that starts with “Now” and describes what you can sense around you. So, “Now the sky is cloudy.” Or, “Now I can taste chocolate.” Or, “Now I hear a bird.”

Whenever my friend’s kids are upset or being difficult, she kicks off a round of the Now Game – and it takes them out of their internal feelings of unhappiness and works an immediate transformation on the situation. (They love it, too.)

6. See Reminders Everywhere

Devout Jews have short blessings they say whenever they encounter a particular everyday situation, to remind themselves to be conscious of G-d. Sufis will deliberately leave behind circling thoughts and feelings whenever they pass through a doorway. Whatever your particular goal, you can keep it in your consciousness by connecting it to your daily activities, making the things you do habitually contribute to the habit you want to build. And you can add reminders to your environment, too – an image of your goal, a copy of your affirmation, a random beep programmed on your phone to remind you to be conscious.

7. Join With Others

There’s no better reminder, and no better motivation, to help you with your goal than someone else who’s doing it with you. Emmons quotes a study that found that participants in a weight loss program who were recruited individually had a 76% completion rate of the program and 24% kept their weight off for 6 months, while those who were recruited along with friends had a 95% completion rate and a 66% maintenance rate.

As social beings, we naturally reinforce each others’ thoughts, feelings and behaviours, the group norms. If you start a group with positive norms, chances are good that it will help towards a positive outcome.

photo credit: Let Ideas Compete

8. Make a Vow

Again from Emmons: Research suggests that a verbal vow, as compared with a written commitment or no commitment at all, increases the likelihood that you’ll carry through with an intention. It seems we still take our given word seriously.

9. Use Good Words

The basis of the highly successful practice known as cognitive therapy is to shift behaviour by shifting thoughts. One intriguing study of antidepressant drugs found that even though it took several weeks before patients felt better, the number of negative thoughts they had reduced almost as soon as they started taking the drugs. While telling yourself lies, that you know to be lies, about yourself is counterproductive, there is something to be said for using the way you phrase things to shift the way you think. “I’m getting fit”, for example, is a good phrase if you want to cultivate a habit of exercise.

10. Act As If

Thoughts, feelings and behaviour feed into one another. Changing your thoughts will change your feelings, and changing your feelings will change your behaviour, but changing your behaviour will change your feelings too. Do the thing that you want to succeed at, and it will come to feel more and more natural as you practice it and build your skills from a basic to an advanced level.

So there are 10 ways to cultivate positive change. My suggestion: Pick one, and try it today.

Technorati Tags: habits, behaviour change, personal change, practice, motivation

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