Doing something for a day is easy! Fasting for a day is easy. Doing sports for a day is easy.
The true character of a person is shown when they have to do something for several weeks!
What really matters in life is not always easy.
There is a natural law that governs our decision and most of the amazing things take time to happen.
I started a 30 days challenge with one goal in mind. Each day I was supposed to walk 7000 steps. It seems an easy task to achieve.
The first two days I realized that the initial enthusiasm wouldn’t help me with this challenge.
I had to plan my time, my tasks and my timing, better. I knew that I can’t afford to miss even a single day. To make my situation even worse, there wasn’t a punishment of following on my goal for a day. If I decided to not do it, it would still be okay. I could easily close my eyes and pretend that this goal is not important, and it doesn’t matter.
This is what many people tell themselves when they build a habit, it starts with “I will skip it this day“. Then we start playing games, Have you heard about this game called – excuses?
It sounds something like this: “I am too busy”, “I am too tired”, “I will do twice as much tomorrow”, “This is not my priority at the moment”, “My horoscope told me not to do it”, and so on.
We easily forget that once we made a compromise with our habits, it is easier to lose them.
This concept can be used to our advantage as well. Do you have a habit which you consider unhealthy? Would you like to get rid of it?
Skip that habit as often as possible! Are you sick and tired of people complaining about you smoking? Then use this tactic to diminish that bad habit.
Think about the alarm clock and the snooze button. We all know it is a bad idea to hit it, since once we had woken up, it’s hard to go back to the state of a quality sleep, but this don’t prevent us from still hitting that alarm button, because at the present moment we don’t think about the consequences!
“Depending on what they are, our habits will either make us or break us. We become what we repeatedly do.”
Steven Covey
If you have the time, and you are interested in this topic, you could read this book – Atomic Habits.
How can we be more aware of the consequences is a topic of another blog post? If you are interested to know more about the topic, please write me in the comment section!
Summary
Life is complicated, and so is building new habits. We have to choose what habits we want to implement in our life and do it consciously. Creating habits is a hard task, but we can implement the same approach which prevent us from having a new habit to a current, “bad” habit in order to eliminate it from our life.
In this article you had learned one thing that could help you in getting rid of a bad habit.
What bad habit you would like to remove from your life this month?
Aleks Vladimirov
Solution Engineering Manager at Thales | Senior IT Professional | Startup Mentor and Product Manager
