The secret to creating lasting change
I recently came across an article that said habits can’t be formed in 30 days; they actually take 45 days to become part of the subconscious mind.
Unfortunately, habits don’t always conform to deadlines. They definitely do need time to be adopted by the subconscious mind, but simply placing blind faith in deadlines doesn’t really work. Take me for example: a few years ago, I challenged myself to pick up yoga as a habit. So, I did yoga 10 minutes daily, following a program that I’d found on the internet. I wasn’t very committed to, it though, I was just counting down the days until it was supposed to become a habit. However, I did not end up forming it as a habit. After 30 days, I did continue practicing yoga, but only for a few more days before I dropped it entirely. The 30-day method of creating new habits did not work in this case, or in the cases of all the other habits I tried to implement in this manner. And I do not believe an extra 15 days would have made a difference.
Some people want to turn the activities they dislike doing into habits so they don’t have to consciously be in the moment when engaging in those activities. For example, some people dislike washing their dishes, but since this is a necessary activity, they want to turn it into a habit. Then they can just wash dishes on autopilot and not have to actively engage in it.
We are all looking to make our lives easier, to alleviate some of the irritation, pain, or any other sort of negative emotions that come with participating in activities we don’t enjoy. So, we fool ourselves into thinking that 30 days, or 45 days, is enough to create a brand-new habit. However, this is not the case. Anyone who has tried this method will know that it very rarely works. What does work is putting active effort into establishing and adopting a habit.
It’s not just dishwashing — nearly everything is unpleasant when it’s new, because it requires willpower, it requires hard work and determination. There are plenty of necessary and/or beneficial activities that people struggle with, namely:
- Starting the day with exercise
- Engaging in deep breathing exercises when they are stressed or angry
- Starting their workday with their most important task
- Checking their emails no more than twice a day
… and so much more! Every single one of the aforementioned activities can greatly benefit your life if adopted as a habit. They may seem difficult and unpleasant at first, but they’re actually very simple. Yet people still struggle with actually starting on them.
Just two years ago, I was reading any and all self-help books I could get my hands on, and I realized that just reading isn’t enough. How do we convert the knowledge in books we read to action in our lives? How do we form the habits we need to better ourselves, and better the quality of our lives?
Then I realized what the missing link between knowledge and action was.
Belief
This isn’t a new concept by far, but it’s certainly a mysterious one. Napoleon Hill addressed it in Think and Grow Rich 80 years ago:
“FAITH is the starting point of all accumulation of riches!
FAITH is the basis of all ‘miracles,’ and all mysteries which cannot be analyzed by the rules of science!
FAITH is the only known antidote for FAILURE!”
Charles Duhigg talked about it in his famous book Power of Habit:
“The precise mechanisms of belief are still little understood.”
Before you can begin to even think about forming a new habit, you must first understand how it contributes to your primary aim.
Will it help you achieve your ultimate desire? Will it help you get one step closer to your goals? Only if the answer to these questions is “yes” will you be able to stay committed to and motivated for forming that habit.
Here’s another example from my life. All the self-help books I’d read clearly proved that meditation would help me succeed in both my professional and personal life. However, I lacked the belief that (what I perceived as) 20 minutes spent doing nothing could ever possibly help me in any way.
So, if you find yourself in a similar situation to the one I was in, you might say to yourself, “Alright, we’ve identified the problem as lacking belief. Well, what’s the solution — how do we create belief?”
Creating belief
To create belief, you need to be in an environment that supports your desire to have that belief. This environment needs to remind you of what you want to change at least once a day so as to create a little more belief in you every day. It’s sort of like reprogramming your brain — you need to rewire your neuro-associations to accept new habits.
I used this method to create beliefs and managed to successfully adopt a number of beneficial habits. These habits include daily meditation and morning rituals (such as drinking fresh ginger tea, taking a shower, and defining my most important task of the day) as well as organizing daily and weekly schedules.
Simply reading self-help books isn’t enough. You need to believe you can change, and believe you need to change.
Getting practical
To help others create belief in themselves, I designed HabitCoach. This mobile application aims to help others successfully form the habits they desire, so they can get practical with the knowledge they acquire from self-help books.
This app consists of the best ideas from several nonfiction self-help books. Choose the habits you want to form from the books you love, and the app will remind you every day of these habits until you are firm in your belief that you can form them. Trust me — once you have created this belief, forming these habits will be nearly effortless.
Forget about things like the 30-day challenge; this is the real deal. All you need to do is spend five minutes a day on this app, and watch your belief system adjust to make your desires a reality.
This app will be released in a few weeks. Show us your support by liking this article to increase our visibility. If you want to be notified via e-mail once our app is up and running, sign up on www.gethabitcoach.com.
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