We had one of our leaders come and talk to us at a work meeting. He was talking about expense pressure and how it is a given. He made a comment that stood out to me – ‘You do not walk around thinking about Gravity, do you?’
His point was expense pressures will always be there – so why spend unnecessary energy thinking about its existence and griping about it? He makes an excellent point. But to treat expense pressures (or any other habit) like gravity requires work.
His comment is not valid only for expense pressure but for any habit that we are trying to build. Think about the process of building a practice. Let’s tackle an easy one – brushing your teeth every day. Do you think about it every day? The chances are that you don’t go around thinking about brushing your teeth. You just wake up and do it. Now, think about avoiding sugar or processed foods. It is highly likely that you think about food a lot when you are trying to build a good eating habit. The goal is to get to a point with food where you treat it just like gravity – it exists.
To get there with habits takes time and courage. First, the desire in you has to be resolute that you do not give up despite challenges, obstacles. Let’s continue with the food habit. It is highly likely that you switch back to the old eating habits in a couple of days or a week and then it takes you days to get back on the ‘good eating’ bandwagon. The desire to have a good eating habit needs to be strong for you to keep trying. And it takes courage to get up after you have fallen umpteen times. The one thing that very few people talk about which you need the most is Self-Compassion. It is tough to change habits because they are ingrained in our minds as neural pathways. And to accomplish this daunting task, we need to have a love for us as we fail.
When we are babies and learn how to walk – we are not caught in the human predicament yet. Hence as babies, we pick ourselves up with very little mind-chatter and keep at it until we start walking. But as we grow up, we become more human; our mind chatter takes over. As a result, we give ourselves a hard time when we fail at anything. And this is where self-compassion is the solution. Be kind to yourself like you would towards a friend until the habit you are trying to build becomes like gravity.
Once the gravitational pull exists, then it does all the work for you – you just have to build enough energy to gather the strength that sucks you into the habit.
Kindness and desire – are the two keywords to build a habitational pull that sustains all the good habits for you.
How will you work on building your habitational pull?