Habits have a notorious instinct to stick like a parasite. You remove ???H??? from the word, A BIT remains. When you remove ???A???, BIT of it remains and finally when you remove the ???B??? ??? IT still shows its trace!
Man???s behaviour is usually caged in the mesh of acquired habits. I have seen many people who get a headache if they do not smoke as soon as they get up in the morning. In one of his books, the CEO of Mind Tree Consulting Mr Subroto Bagchi suggests that the biggest challenge he faced when he shifted his professional status from an employee to an employer was the “lack of habit to wait for an appointment!” As a Chief Executive, one is habitual to have all appointments and needs to be served on call, instantly but getting into the shoes of an entrepreneur one needs to learn new habits!
Each one of us has a unique set of habits. Getting up early in the morning or sleeping late in the night is also a form of habit. Brushing our teeth, taking a wash, offering prayers, watching television, engaging on social media, being short-tempered or abusing etc. are all habits which get strongly framed in the DNA of an individual when repeatedly practised for a long duration. These habits then reflect the behaviour & define the personality of the person!
Once a sales executive of an automobile company contacted me for counselling. He shared that he had been recently sacked by the employer. When I enquired the reason, he confessed ??? “I am in the habit of telling a lie. Every time I acquire a client, I misrepresent the facts and tell a lie.??? He further said, ???Sir, I have spoiled many relationships because of this bad habit. Please help me change my habit!???
Apparently, it seems challenging to change a habit. Ask a person who is used to liquor ??? can he ever live without it? The reply will be – a big NO. He would do whatever but never give away with the habit! Habits are addictive ??? it???s true not just about alcohol or nicotine or drugs but for each and every habit.
In the classical conditioning theory discovered by Ivan Pavlov, it was identified that there is a stimulus for every response. In his experiment, every time a bell rang, the dog was given pudding by the researcher who wore a lab coat. Pavlov noticed that the dog began to salivate every time it heard the ring of the bell. It was also seen that the dog would drool whenever it saw people wearing lab coats! Point to be noted is that actual presence of food was not required for the dogs to trigger the conditional response ??? which was actually a habit!
The best way to work on our habits is to identify the trigger. There is this real-life story of one of my client Laddu Pinto ??? he was known for high decibel anger in his social sphere. Every time he reacted in anger, he lost an inch of self-confidence. His friends and family had already started abhorring him and even maintaining a distance. Laddu once shared, “My kids are happy whenever I am on business tour, and my office colleagues are so tense when I am around in the office.” Laddu wanted to change all this. Both of us started working towards achieving this transformation. After a few sessions of in-depth discussions, what came out was astonishing. Laddu had a typical story: While he was a school student, he had an average academic performance. On top of it, he had picked up a habit of stammering. His teachers and a few friends used to mock at him always. Every time someone laughed at him, he used to get embarrassed as well as angry and would resolve strongly to take revenge. Eventually, over the years, anger became his habit and whenever he saw someone happy, he would have an outburst!
As a resolution technique, we focussed on the habit trigger, and it worked. Laddu was advised to unconditionally pardon all those who might have ridiculed him in his childhood. He was encouraged to focus on everything that was good in his life concurrently. Likewise, for the automobile sales executive, ‘it was identified that he was focussed only on the sales incentive & not on the overall worth of a customer’. To change his habit, he was educated on the fact that financial returns would grow exponentially if he were able to win a customer with fair practice. This man’s trigger was money and the moment he realised that telling a lie was actually curtailing his wealth ??? he came out of the habit of lying!
Friends, we all can change habits. It’s possible. However, a word of caution is not to rush with multiple targets and to be utterly patient. Neurological science suggests that any pattern of activity repeatedly performed for 21 days tends to become a temporary habit. Subsequently if the same is repeated for 90 days, it becomes a permanent behaviour. Start with one habit at a time, identify the trigger and experiment on modifying it consistently for 90 days. I am sure ??? you will see the change!
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