About habits

The problem: Unwanted habits are to be changed which often turns out to be a very long and stony way.
As the new year is coming near at a lot of places I read about new years resolutions and habit changes. I don't want to write about new years resolutions because (not only) in my opinion changes are not only to be performed when the year in the date changes. There are a lot of opportunities and as it usually takes a long time and mostly also several attempts to change a habit it is not clever to limit personal improvement to happen only once in a year.

Reading lifehack and other blogs you can read several hints on how to change habits and for example you can read that it takes approximately a month to change a habit. I found several very useful posts out there but while collecting them I recognized that I very seldom thought of changing a particular habit. So I began to think why.

The reason: Habits are often only the visible side effects of the philosophies you are living.
You do live habits not because they happened to you as an accident. You live them because of "good" reasons according to your life experiences - or shocks respectively. As I wrote in "Find the root problem" several different personal (development) problems often have some common "parent problem". And so in my opinion a habit is just a leaf at the tree of problems.

The solution: Change your way of thinking and your philosophy.
First identify the reasons why you are running into the same habits again and again. The reason is usually not just a trigger, but your view of the world and the way you are interpreting your experiences with people and several event types occurring in your life. Reflecting your view of the world and the philosophies your are living and changing the general intentions will remove a lot of unwanted habits automatically, at once and without further big effort - and that is the advantage of grabbing problems at the root.

To give an example: There might be several reasons why you may not be able to communicate with people you do not know well. There might be several fears that prevent you from speaking free out what you want. There might be the fear of making a bad first impression or the fear of getting hurt by sarcastic responses. A root problem perhaps is a big dependency of foreign affirmation. There can be a lot of such discouragements that prevent you from starting a communication. Liberating yourself from this dependency can resolve communication problems automatically because you withdraw the culture medium of the problems arising because of such a basic dependency or fear.

Related post: Primary motivator.