We all have habits we want to develop — or change. We seek to develop habits so that our actions can be automatic. This saves us cognitive and decision bandwidth.
Many people talk about the challenge of creating habits.
I’ve been teaching and coaching habit change for over a decade, and in my personal experience and with clients I’ve found that creating new habits is actually not that complex.
It may involve some strategic planning at the start, but if you know what you want to do, you can usually find a way to turn it into a habit.
The hardest part about habit change isn’t creating the new habit; it’s breaking the old habit.
Because habits become automatic, we don’t think about what we’re doing. And that sets up our challenge: noticing what we’re doing that’s no longer working.
The first step to change is awareness.
Without awareness, we remain stuck in the same loops.
This applies to habits of action as well as thought habits.
This is how we come to rely on entrenched ideas and protocols even when they’ve been disproven.
In theory, you’d question every entrenched belief or dogma you encounter. But the reality is that you can’t question what you don’t notice.
Breaking a habit requires pausing long enough to ask:
Is this still serving me?
When we can interrupt our patterns to question what we’re doing and why, we gain agency.
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