WATCH YOUR HABITS

Habit is who you are. We are all products of habit. Everything, or at least, majority of what we do comes from habit. 

From the day we are born we start learning habits. How to do this and how to do that. What is a habit? I will advance several definitions.

1. It is an action performed repeatedly and automatically usually without awareness

2. A settled or regular tendency of practice especially one that is hard to give up. 

3. A behaviour pattern acquired by frequent repetition of psychological exposure that shows itself in regularity or increased facility of performance. 

4. An acquired behaviour pattern that is repeated regularly and becomes almost involuntary. 

5. A routine of behaviour that occurs regularly and tends to our subconsciously. 

KEYWORDS: Behaviour, Acquired, Repeatedly, Automatic/Subconscious, Practice

Before I continue, permit me to enlighten you on the mind. A person who initially starts learning how to drive finds it hard to hold a conversation as all the focus is on the different driving manoeuvres. This person is driving with the conscious mind. After hours upon hours of practice this same person can hold a conversation and still drive well. Driving becomes automatic that it's carried out without thought: the subconscious mind is now used for driving. 

We can see that there are two parts of the mind: the conscious mind (CM) and subconscious mind (SM). The CM is like the RAM in computer language while the SM is like the hard disk. The CM operates in the present while the SM operates in the past by assessing database developed and built by experience/training/repetition. The CM is responsible for LOGIC while the SM is responsible for HABIT. 

It is important to know how we use the power of the mind to form habits. Our habits make us who we are. The way you write, talk, cook, walk, wear your shoes, dress up are habits. The way you respond emotionally is a habit. Nigeria is the way it is today because our political leaders have formed the habit of impunity. Smoking is habit, a bad one, just as yawning without putting a palm over the mouth is. Even the way you sit on the toilet is a habit. Habits are honed by hours of practice. There are good and bad habits.

 

A good habit is a behaviour that is beneficial to ones' physical or mental health, often linked to a high level of discipline and self control. A bad habit is the exact opposite. Basically, the moment your level of discipline and self control drops on any particular thing and you follow this pattern repeatedly a bad habit is formed. Same thing goes for a good habit. I can never overemphasise the fact that we are what we do repeatedly. This is why it has been said, I can't remember by who (Aristotle, I think), that excellence is not an act but a habit. 

Is this not why we have or should have Standard Operating Procedures, SOPs, for everything? We shouldn't just think of SOP only at work. An SOP tells us the best practice or logical sequence of how to carry out a task. For instance, if you are hot tempered, have you drawn out an SOP on how not to get upset at the slightest provocation? If you write down this SOP and follow it repeatedly for a while you form a new habit. 

Bad habits are very easy to pick up but quite hard to drop. In fact to drop a bad habit you must replace it with a good habit which you learn deliberately. We pick up bad habits easily because they require a reduced or the lowest level of discipline/self control to acquire. Bad habits are formed when we allow ourselves to dwell in the 'comfort zone' of no/low standards/rules. The moment an act becomes comfortable chances are that standards, discipline or self control have been compromised. Bad habits, comfort and ease all sleep on the same bed. From the above, you can deduce why good habits appear hard to pick up. They require lots of discipline and self control. 

Get pen and paper, write down the bad habits you know you have, then write the good habits you know you have. You may discover that you wrote down more bad habits than good habits. Don't be alarmed though. It's not abnormal. What is not normal is allowing this to subsist. I will show you how you can develop good habits and use them to replace bad habits. Design an SOP for this good habit you want to pick. This becomes your program. Every habit is a program stored in your subconscious mind or your hard disk. What I am going to write now is called DELETION and INSERTION (D&I), in my parlance. Delete a bad habit and insert a new one. At a particular time(s) everyday pull out this SOP and read it carefully. The language used to write this matters. Personalise it. 

The more you read this SOP to yourself the more it gets engraved into your subconscious mind. Given time, say after a month, you will notice that you are beginning to make 'mistakes' in the way you execute the bad habit you are fighting. At this stage what you are doing is training your subconscious mind to master the new skill. Now begin to practice this new skill. Do this repeatedly for a while and there you are.

 

As I close, what school teaches us is habit. This is why courses are measured in hours. It actually means hours of exposure to a discipline. When students go on industrial training it's habit they are sent to pick up and master. You become excellent with good or bad habits through dedicated practice. It is up to you to choose which habits you pick or drop.