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By Phil Parker Do Dip E Hyp Psyc CMPNLP

More of the core skills for making your life and work even more productive successful and enjoyable are available in Phil Parker's handbook for self coaching "The 10 Questions" available at www.philparker.org .

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Habits and resolutions

Why do we break them?
The fact that they are so easy to break highlights exactly the reason why we chose to make those resolutions in the first place. They address powerful but unwanted habits.
The power of habit (from the Latin to have or hold) is worth considering.
Try this out.
The colours exercise (apologies to those of you reading this on monochrome machines! Go to philparker.org/auto.htm to see it in colour)
Read, out loud, the colour of the word rather than the word itself

YELLOW BLUE ORANGE
BLACK RED GREEN
PURPLE YELLOW RED
ORANGE GREEN BLACK
BLUE RED PURPLE
GREEN BLUE ORANGE

Did you notice that strong urge inside to say the name of the word rather than it's colour? That's because we are so well trained to read words rather than assess them for colour (graphic designers find this exercise less of a challenge). This is a good example of the habitual nature of brain function.

How do habits work?
A particular behaviour is created by the stimulation of a particular set of brain cells. The more often that behaviour is used and that set of brain cells is stimulated, the more well defined that pathway becomes, and hey presto! you have fast track behaviour superhighway.
You can think of it like making a track through a jungle, if you go the same route everyday soon the track will soon become well defined and so easy to follow that everyone will use it, making that track wider and faster to use.

Habits=bad, yes?
No, not all habits are bad; in fact all of them are useful in some context or other.
Writing or driving are habitual behaviours with obvious benefits.
Getting drunk can be a habitual behaviour, which is designed for having fun or blocking out the pain of life, but obviously when it becomes used too often it creates alcoholism.

Why do we have habits?
The big plus side of habitual behaviour is that they make it easier to do things automatically without us having to figure out how to do it from scratch each time. But this is also their weakness as their automatic-ness can mean we start to do them before we've really considered the consequences.

Consider the tale of two doors.
When we're 18 months old we suddenly discover how to open doors. A push or pull and we've mastered getting in and out of every door in our home, but this is nothing compared to our delight as we discover it works everywhere else too. Pretty cool.
Until we meet that strangest of things, the sliding door….
Hinged doors have a very long and full life, but pity the sliding door, however, which rarely makes it past five full years before it has to be sent to the great DIY store in the sky. This early demise results from it being so regularly wrenched off its guiding rails by us inappropriately, and with increasing force in response to its stoic resistance, applying the same "hinged door opening" technology we learned as 18 month olds.

So next time you break a resolution, just recognise you're responding just as you pre-programmed yourself to do. And that your programming just needs updating.

The trick with habits is to be selective, and to choose which familiar behaviours to apply in which situations.

We'll look at how to do this next time.

Phil Parker's latest book is

Ten Questions

The handbook for self coaching

"In this concise and engaging manual Dr. Phil Parker manages to deliver the key elements for creating change and managing the challenges of business and personal life.

The genius idea of this book is that it transforms these change concepts into simple, understandable, practical, universal Questions.

I highly recommend this book to everyone interested in personal and professional development and success."

Steve Andreas, Author, trainer and NLP pioneer

For information on how to order the book '10 Questions' http://www.philparker.org/