Episode 67 Habits – Breaking Bad: 3 Steps to Reprogramming your Habits

Habits – Breaking Bad: 3 Steps to Reprogramming your Habits What is a new year if not a time to create resolutions, feel crappy when we don’t really keep them, and then create stories in our minds about how we never follow through! Yay – happy new year and welcome back to the habit of attempting a new start toward better ways at the beginning of each new year. We always mean so well. Today, I have a solution that actually has a pretty strong chance of success – a 3 step process that works for changing bad habits. Travis Bradberry said, “Humans are creatures of habit. If you quit when things get tough, it gets that much easier to quit the next time. On the other hand, if you force yourself to push through it, the grit begins to grow in you.” Our habits create our character. Do you realize you have story habits? Stories that get replayed, over and over in your mind as fact. Since our character is defined by our habits, and our lives are created with our stories, it seems pretty important to consider the habitual stories we’ve got playing on autoplay. Stay tuned today for 3 steps from Michael Bungay Stanier, a Wall Street Journal Bestseller, that will give us a pattern for breaking the bad stories and reprogramming our own minds with better stories. You can also use the 3 step process for reprogramming any habit you want to change, but today we are focusing on actually changing the habitual stories that don’t serve us. Stories are our lives in language. Welcome to the Love Your Story podcast. I’m Lori Lee, and I’m excited for our future together of telling stories, evaluating our own stories, and lifting ourselves and others to greater places because of our control over our stories. This podcast is about empowerment and giving you, the listener, ideas to work with in making your stories work for you. Power serves you best when you know how to use it.   Neville said, “Health, wealth, beauty and genius are not created, they are only manifested by the arrangement of your mind—that is, by your concept of yourself, and your concept of yourself is all that you accept and consent to as true.” In other words, what we believe is true about ourselves is perpetuated by the stories we let play about us – in our own minds, and then these stories determine what we believe is true about us and we behave and allow accordingly, creating our health, wealth, beauty and genius. Our habitual stories create our own concept of self. So, let’s ask the first and most obvious question – what do you consent to as true about you? Have you accepted your own value, your own worthiness, your strength, resilience, and beauty? Have you embraced your own good heart, your own talents and gifts? Do you embody your badass superhero persona, because in fact, that’s who you are? Or, do you need to change a few stories to get on this track? There is a woman I know who raises her grandchildren. She has changed her life of being an empty nester to doing homework, attending sporting events, dealing with curfews and all the fun and challenge that comes from raising kids again. It’s a lot of work and yet whenever you talk to her about it she refuses to acknowledge how absolutely fantastic she is for this beautiful sacrifice of her time, sanity and years of service in taking on this challenge, that exhausts her. She refuses to embrace her own good heart for what it is. She won’t claim her Wonder Woman status. Why? When we do hard things like make it through a layoff, or a car crash, or an illness; when we make it through challenges like a divorce, a lawsuit, a friend stabbing you in the back and we do it with ethics and behavior we are proud of;  when we reach out to others to lift and comfort and make the world better where we can, there is nothing at all wrong with giving yourself a mental high-five and acknowledging that you are doing a great job. Every time you get it right.