
“Habits are safer than rules, you don’t have to watch them. And you don’t have to keep them either…. They keep you.”
Are your habits keeping you?
I am in the midst of preparing a Mater Class that I will run at the end of the month. In that I mention habits or patterns of behaviour that are being driven by our subconscious minds. Sometimes it is a behaviour we have been taught by our parents & we actually don’t realise that there is in fact another way to do things. I found this out when I yelled at a teacher & felt the shame of exhibiting a behaviour that was not allowed in our house. Only to find our years later that the teacher just accepted it as behaviour from a little person having to learn how to manage her emotions. She didn’t regard it as shameful. We can also have habits we develop to protect ourselves & really we don’t need them anymore.
We can have habits that we are happy to keep, and there are some that we really want to let go of but the conscious mind isn’t strong enough to ‘muscle’ it out. Like smoking or wanting to lose weight, the subconscious wins a lot of the time. So we have to be sneaky to slip under the radar so to speak. When I first started doing my coaching training we had to look at a list of limiting beliefs and pick one that resonated. It was then suggested that that we just say the opposite. “No way.” said my subconscious, “I don’t believe one piece of that.” Later I learnt a tapping technique, to go ‘grey’ rather than black or white, by saying I choose to believe….. It’s not such absolute language & somehow it tricks the subconscious. Often we feel pleased we have got the upper hand on that one, then something else crops up, or something big triggers us again. This is apparently lifetime work folks – if you come to coaching I don’t expect you to come for life. We can learn skills that we practice going forward.
Enjoy changing those habits that you don’t want to keep you anymore!