In this blog post I’m going to share the biggest step that changed my life for good. It let me channel my energy in order for it to be productive and helped me to understand the key upon everything we do is hinged upon.
In order to change things, we have to understand them.
Many years back, I wanted to change my life. I wanted to think happier thoughts, live a happier life. And I knew that in order to change my mind, I had to understand it first. I had to understand my ‘negative’ emotions, my unwanted thoughts.
And what I came to understand changed the core foundation of my life, the premises I live on an everyday basis:
Our life consists of habits.
It’s all about habits. From the very first moment we wake up until we fall asleep again, our life consists of habits. There might be big habits, and smaller ones. An imperceptible amount of tiny, tiny habits. But even if they are as small as one little thought, the sum of our habits creates our life.
One drop of water might not be much. But a lot of tiny drops make up an entire ocean.
We are, what we create our lives to be. But we also are what we create our habits to be.
We are the sum of our habits. And our habits will dictate our happiness.
Yes, we might not have had a saying in all the circumstances in our life that brought us to this very point. But we will always have a saying in how we want our past to dictate our future.
No matter our past, we can always shape our own future.
And we can always shape our habits.
What is a habit? Habits are deeply tread-in pathways in our mind that it can easily follow. They help to take away the conscious thinking-effort. Our mind follows these well-known patterns all day long, day-in and day-out.
That’s why it’s so easy to fall back into old habits: our mind instantly recognizes the tread-in way and wants to follow it. But it also means that we can train new habits. Happy Habits. The more we follow the new paths, the new thinking-patterns, the easier it will become. The easier it will become to make a habit of it.
And forming new Happy Habits that empower us and our inner wellbeing, that’s what it’s really all about. Our mind follows habits easily since they are nothing but already tread-in ways in the workings of our mind and brain. Developing habits – that’s the real effort.
Now let us look at our everyday habits.
There might be some good habits, some not-so-good ones and then the ones we sure would like to toss out of the window. The good, the bad, the ugly. And all that.
Today, take a look at your own habits.
From the moment you wake up until you go back to sleep in the evening. What habits can you identify? What’s the first thing you do in the morning? What about your breakfast routine, your way to work, your lunch breaks, afternoon, and evening? By what habits do you live?
Remember:
In order to change things, we have to understand them.
If you feel unfulfilled in your everyday life, take a good and hard look at your own habits. Chances are, many of them aren’t serving you, nor the happiness you are seeking.
You might want to change old habits and exchange them for new ones. In my previous blog posts I already shared Happy Habits to practice Self-Love (read here) and Gratitude (read here). But it doesn’t have to be these habits. Really dig into the question of what would feel good for you, what would bring you more joy, what would elevate your everyday?
What would elevate your life?
What different behavior could change your life?
Without different behavior, there can’t be a different outcome.
So let’s change our behavior. Let's create a different outcome. Let's claim our inherit power to change our life. To create the life we’d like to live.
The life we deserve.
Because we deserve it.