How to Finally Change Your Habits

Video + Free Printable Worksheet Below

There are two main obstacles that stand between you and your new desired habit.

Habit Formation. In other words, tricking your brain to adopt the new behavior in exchange for the old behavior. You know what you want to change in your actions. How to get your brain to want to do this for you instead or argue with you or talk you out of the new behavior?

FEAR. Yes, that strange phenomenon that pops up to “protect” us from things we’ve already logically decided we don’t need protecting from. Fear is sneaky. We may think we want an amazing, fit body that comes from working out and eating clean, but our fear of not fitting in is what makes us accept the donuts at work because that is what everyone else is doing in the break room.

Notice that both of these obstacles involve tricking or convincing your brain to do what you want it to do. The issue here isn’t that you’re not in charge of your brain. You most certainly are. Your brain does EXACTLY what we tell it to do for us. It does not question our logic. The real problem here is we send our brain signals unintentionally and so we get unintended results. For example, when you send your brain a message of “I want that new job so badly.” But….when we send that thought out, we don’t even realize we’ve attached another thought to it. That thought attached to it could be “….but, I don’t think I will really get it.”

Only when we give our thoughts a pure intention will our brains follow that direction as we intend. Law of Attraction says only what we ARE is what we attract. In other words, in the prior thought what IS, is a notice of lack, a notice of disconnect. The person wants the new job but believes they can’t really have it. That is not an energetic vibration that will attract the job. That is a vibration that will attract the lack of the job because that is the energy being emitted. Once we can see all the dimensions of all sides of our thoughts can we see the inherent problem with our thinking and begin to make corrections.

There are a couple reasons that can help explain this frustrating phenomenon.

We only operate with about 5% of our brain in a conscious manner. The other 95% of our decisions and actions come from our subconscious brain. That is the part of the brain responsible for keeping you breathing and your heart beating. You don’t consciously tell your lungs to breathe. Your subconscious handles that for you on autopilot. Nice huh? But, it also handles a lot more than that on autopilot. Some of the conditioned behaviors we have come from meanings we applied to life back when we were not yet eight years old. So the meaning of an eight-year-old and their view of the world at that time could be driving your bus right now. You don’t have to have had serious trauma in your childhood for that to be scary and completely ineffective. To make changes in your subconscious programming a technique RTT or Rapid Transformational Therapy can be used. Check out my website if you want to learn more about this powerful tool.

Secondly, our neuron pathways are physically formed and difficult to change. The good news is they can be changed and you can develop new neuron pathways to support habits you desire. Studies show that humans think on average about 60,000 thoughts per day. Wow! That is basically one thought per second during our waking hours. We are busy little thinkers. But, are we busy heading in the direction we desire? Not so much. Studies also show that 98% of the thoughts you have today are the same thoughts you had yesterday. That is disappointing. It seems we are busy doing a whole bunch of loops on repeat.

So, how to make the change?

One of the most powerful ways I know to master your thinking is to introduce meditation into your life. Before you can redirect your thoughts in a new direction you must first tune in to what they are. Meditation shows you how to witness your thoughts first. Secondly, meditation shows you what quiet feels like. Once you can get to a still, quiet place in your mind, only then is it ready for these new thoughts and new neuron pathways to be formed.

Here are some great free apps to get you started. Just find a quiet place. Select an app and length of time that works for you. Listen to the app and practice. It is a practice. There is no right way or wrong way to meditate. It is just you being present with yourself. A session can look like me fighting with my thoughts for a full 20 minutes or a session can be me feeling like I left my body, saw colors, felt warm physical sensations and floated into space for a while. Anything and everything is accepted in meditation. The important part is you give space to feel your own essence and your connection to all that is.

And if being present, alone, in silence with yourself sounds a little scary, that’s even more reason to give meditation a real chance.

http://www.10percenthappier.com/mindfulness-meditation-the-basics

https://www.headspace.com/headspace-meditation-app

https://insighttimer.com/

In the video, I go over what meditation is and isn’t and how to get started.

Plus I go over a super cool trick to force negative thoughts out of your brain. 

I’ve included this worksheet for you to journal your meditation observations this week. 

I’d love to hear from you!

In Love, Light, and Faith,

Dawn