Breaking The Cycle of Repeated Mistakes
September 18th, 2008 by AndyI’m pretty sure that most of you conscious of at least one habit that you have developed that gets repeated over and over again in the same situations. Some of these may be positive habits, like brushing your teeth, yet others may be bad like smoking. On top of these habits that you are aware of, there are probably many others that you don’t consciously recognize as habits. These habits can also be good, but I am going to focus on the bad ones that might cause us to repeat the same useless behaviors over and over.
In order to tackle these unconscious bad habits, its important to understand how and why they are formed. A habit is formed when your subconscious deems something to be positive and useful to you. It generalizes the situation, and applies that generalization in the future. Once a habit has been formed, whatever action it requires is automatically performed outside of your consciousness. In other words, you don’t know it happens. When it comes to brushing your teeth, this is a good thing because it has to be done. When it comes to meeting new people, however, you probably don’t need to panic.
Habits can often extend into much larger parts of our lives without us realizing it. You may have known someone who has been finding jobs and getting fired repetitiously for years. This person has a pattern, or habit that he keeps repeating over and over again. He probably has no idea why he keeps getting fired, and may even blame others, but somehow he has developed a pattern that leads him to the same place every time. In the same way, these habits permeate all of our lives.
The good news is that there are ways to break these habits. First and foremost I’d recommend finding an NLP practitioner who can help give you new choices to use rather than repeating that same loop. If that’s not possible, you try to gain conscious control over the the habit. If you have ever been a smoker and attempted to quit, you probably know exactly what I mean. In this situation there will be times when you’ll notice you have a lit cigarette in your hand and not know how it got there. Other times you may notice that you’re lighting one and stop yourself. In that first case, the cigarette got there because your unconscious mind ran its program (your habit) for smoking outside of your consciousness. In the second case, you as soon as you realized you were lighting the cigarette, you had conscious control over it and could stop.
In order to change these unconscious habits, you have to interrupt the unconscious programs. If there is a specific situation where you have problems, make little changes. Try sitting or standing differently. Try talking in a different tone of voice. If you always watch what’s happening, try listening instead. You can try anything that’s different than what you would normally do in this situation. I offer so many suggestions because what will work for you depends on you at that specific point in time.
I know that whole practice seems too simple to be true. It really isn’t as simple as it may seem, yet this is extremely effective. It can be very difficult to consciously make even small changes in a stressful situation because our conscious minds are focused on the situation, while our unconscious takes care of everything else. With this in mind, if you do have trouble applying this in highly stressful situations, attempted it on smaller, less stressful bad habits.
Now I’m off to break my bad habit of not doing my laundry when I should. I wish you all the best!
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