The BOLD (Good Habits Gone Bad)
We continue our October theme of Pierce the Transparency™. In order to grow, develop and activate transformation, we must prepare to be open, give permission for learning and figure out how to see what we don’t know we don’t know.
Habits serve us. They make it possible for us to save energy and to replicate success. However, they may also keep us from growing, learning and discovering possibilities that are hiding in plain sight. An occasional awareness audit can ensure that even our habits are intentional.
The Whisper (Don’t Go With the Flow)
You live in the groove. Because your brain demands about 20% of the energy you consume (despite accounting for only about 2% of your body’s weight), your brain has become a master of efficiency.
Bias is a function of this need to streamline—we make assumptions based on past lessons and learning, even if that information is not true or not relevant in the current situation.
HABITS
Habits are another mechanism that protects our energy consumption. By batching thoughts and functions, our brains can create efficient, simple routines that treat the solution to a challenge or opportunity as one action. This takes far less mental energy than if we were to carefully design each step of the process each time.
Imagine if you had to think through every step of tying your shoes like you did when you were learning. As a matter of fact, it might be difficult for you to detangle the action “tie your shoes” into its component motions.
I know that this process of calling out the steps of an ingrained habit is difficult because I considered doing that here. “Hold the laces, one in each hand. Thread the right lace under the left lace in such a way that the left lace rides under and passes to the right hand. Use the right hand to form a loop with the lace that is currently being held by the left hand…” Ugh! Just forget I said anything.
MOMENTUM
Momentum is a third mechanism. By perpetuating the activity in which you are currently engaged, your brain avoids expending energy making decisions about what else you could be doing. Tying your second shoe happens almost without thought.
These mechanisms serve us as we move through our lives and help us to complete actions in an energy cost-efficient way that allows us to easily repeat successful processes.
These mechanisms can also keep us from learning, growing or changing. Every positive force has a potential shadow side. The shadow side of brain efficiency is that a grove can become a rut.
How strong are momentum and habit grooves? Ask yourself: How hard is it to turn off the TV and go to sleep? How hard is it to walk out the door 10 minutes early when you are in the middle of doing something consider valuable, even if it is going to make you late? Remember the time you drove a familiar route and arrived without any conscious awareness of how you got there or about whether any of the lights were red?
In order to make a change, we have to see what we are currently doing, understand what improvement is available and be aware that change is possible. That’s hard to do when you are moving through a bundled series of actions without much conscious thought.
How, then, do we break through habit? We can, in our more introspective moments before we initiate a habit sequence, make a conscious choice to do something different and to notice what happens.
AWARENESS AUDIT
For instance, you could decide (right now, as you are reading this) that you are going to drive a different way to work (or some other familiar place) tomorrow. A few years ago I heard Chris Barez-Brown, founder of Upping Your Elvis, speak about doing an awareness audit by simply making the decision to take a different driving route. He said that if you do so with a sense of curiosity, there is no telling what you will discover.
So you decide that you want to break a habit, just for one morning. You will need a reminder. You could walk out to your car and put a post-it note on your steering wheel so that your intention is not lost in the triggering sequence of sliding into the seat and turning the key. You do that every time so the habit persists with momentum from that moment unless something interrupts you. You might set a reminder on your phone.
In order to do something outside of an installed habit, you need a reminder from your current self that helps your future self to remember what you were intending to do and to take a different action.
What awareness audit will you run this week? Is there a habit you’d like to interrupt long enough to see what you’ve been mindlessly doing?
Momentum and habit have their rightful place. The more intentional we can be about, however, about deciding which habits to keep, which to re-design and which to eliminate, the more we can design the clarity that catalyzes the outcomes we would like to create.
If you’re in the grove, make sure it’s on a record you really want to play.
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