To aid you in this process, here are a few ideas:
If a habit can be scheduled, then you can use some sort of timing device (such as an alarm set in your smartphone) to remind you each time the habit needs to be performed. This provides a means to break out of your old habit and establish a new one.
What if the habit cannot be timed, but rather it is a response that you wish to develop to a trigger event? In that case you can still use reminders to help you. Write the habit on a card, and leave it on your table where you will see it at breakfast each day. Put it in on your office desk. If you use the Pathways Planner, record it as a goal or as a policy, and review it regularly. During the habit forming period, this will help you to remember what you will do when the occasion arises.
Rehearse the habit in your mind so that it is almost automatic in its real application. This makes it a more successful competitor to the old, automatic habit.
The more things you must consciously remember to do, the harder it will be. Determine which habit(s) are essential for a start, and concentrate on those. Once those become automatic, then you can start working on additional habits.
It is almost inevitable that you will fail to apply your new habit some of the time. This leads many people to suppose that they are incapable of adopting the habit. If they realized that failure was normal, they might keep trying. Indeed, even well practiced "automatic" habits occasionally fail to kick in when they are needed. So if the habit is important to you, don't let any number of lapses deter you. Try and try again.
If you can find someone whom you trust, tell them about the habit you wish to develop. A suitable mentor is someone who is often present on occasions where you might exercise the habit, and who is a person that you can trust. NOTE that the mentor does not always have to be an expert in how to solve your problem(s). They just have to be someone who can observe whether you are applying your habit or not, who cares about you (who is sympathetic, who is a friend, who will be diligent in helping you).
Next best to having a mentor is having someone to whom you can report your progress. The mere fact that you will be discussing this with another person is an incentive to apply more diligence in applying the habit. This strategy is generally easier to achieve than mentorship, because the individual doesn't actually have to be present to observe your habit.
The counselor does not necessarily have to be a professional. It could be a friend or family member. But when you have a serious problem and there is no-one close to you who can help, it would be foolish to ignore the possibility of getting professional advice.
To bolster your resolve for a habit that has no apparent results, it is essential to find out how likely it is to deliver results in the long term. That is, you substitute the experience of other people for your own inexperience. You can find this out by talking to other people, or by gathering the information from books.
Are there any missing pre-requisite habits? Is this habit only going to work if other habits are followed concurrently? How exactly will your behavior change? What are some scenarios in which it might apply? How does this fit into your overall goals and objectives? Answering these questions can overcome a number of the problems described above.
As mentioned above, sometimes only a collection of habits will deliver the results you want (and even then, it may be hard to see the relationship because the results occur so gradually). But for many habits that you may adopt, there is value in them even if they don't produce the desired end results. For example, in your search for friendship you may adopt the habit of remembering peoples' names. Maybe that won't actually produce friendship, but if it gives rise to a more pleasant and friendly environment then its worthwhile anyway.
My advice is to adopt any "obviously nice" behavior on that basis alone, regardless of whether you see any "payback".
Earlier I described how attitude problems can prevent a person from achieving their desires. In the example of the child who resolved not to care about anybody (despite wanting desperately to be liked), an effective way to turn this around is by demonstrated success. In that case, what it takes is one person to reach out to them just once and show them that they can win. This become the foundation upon which further development is built.
The happiest people are those who undertake moderate, achievable challenges. Moreover, people are motivated more effectively by positive rewards than by fear of punishment. So the person who achieves a small win has a new experience of happiness, and this spurs them on to try.
As they begin to feel good about themselves, they gradually take on progressively more difficult challenges until eventually they achieve the goal they set for themselves.
Perhaps the biggest mistake that a person can make is to get so caught up in day-to-day matters that they never stop to think about "where they are going." You need think about the habits you want to adopt, and your success in developing the knowledge, skills, and habits that you have been working on. You need to reserve time to think about these things.
It is a good idea to reserve some quiet time for yourself to do that each week. I suggest that bedtime is not the best time for that, because you may find that it interferes with getting to sleep. (You may find that even though you try to sleep, you can't put thoughts out of your mind that you should have dealt with during the day.) If you have regular habit to reflect and you reserved time for it, you will have more confidence and success overall.
I cannot overstate the importance of this final item. It is the foundation for all the rest.
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