Think About Why You’re Doing

In Gulliver’s Travels, we get to see two nations at war with each other about which end should be used to crack an egg. No one knows why, it’s just always been that way. It’s a HABIT, and leaving it unchallenged has made the lives of both nations more difficult.
How do we develop habits? We PRACTICE them into being.
I’m right-handed (and no, I do not feel I was oppressed into it by the right-handed majority.) This Christmas my son gave me a coffee mug with a special, writing-oriented message on it (“I’m a Writer... Everything You Say or Do May End Up in My Novel”.) If I hold the mug with my right hand, as I have 99.9% of my life, I’m the only one who can read the message, which means I am the one being threatened with my life becoming an expose. So I have taken to holding the mug with my left hand in order to threaten (and amuse) others instead.
The decision to hold this particular mug in my left hand is a conscious one, to achieve a specific objective in the best way possible. However, I now find that I hold mugs in my left hand MOST of the time. This is NOT a conscious decision – sometime over the last three months it has become a HABIT.
I’m lucky to have this example – most of the time we go through life developing habits, and don’t give why a second thought. We can’t remember what started it, but we let it persist of its own force, JUST BECAUSE IT IS WHAT IT IS.
In the past, this sort of acceptance of habitual behavior was beneficial more often than not (there IS such a thing as a GOOD HABIT, and if you want to get rid of a bad one, the easiest way is to replace it with one of those.) But things moved far more slowly WAY BACK THEN. The tools you used, the activities you were involved in, most of those things wouldn’t change much over 40 years. You might even work for the same company that long, and they weren’t likely to change their habits, either.
That isn’t the world we live in now. New technologies spring up daily, and it isn’t JUST technology – the way we do things becomes outmoded before we realize it. We’re more mobile in where we live, how we function, where we work - in any number of ways.
In this world of rapid change, can you really afford to keep your old habits as they are? Maybe there are things you’ve been carrying from your past that are making your life more difficult now. When was the last time you examined your behavior inventory?
Take the time to question everything you do once in a while. MAKE THAT YOUR NEW HABIT.
Just saying….

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