Have you ever thought to yourself, “I can’t do that, it’s too hard”? How often does this happen… once a week, every day? We often find ourselves talking our way out of challenges we don’t want to face on a regular basis. This is generally due to a lack of motivation or having a million other things which are easier and more fun to do. The flipside being, all of those things we’d rather be doing are generally less productive and don’t get us anywhere to achieving our goals and ambitions. Thankfully, there are some sure-fire ways of transforming your bad habits into good habits.

Firstly, you need to understand what exactly a habit is, and how habits are formed. Habits can be referred to as your “action you take after a specific thought process”. For example when you have a shower: you take your clothes off, open the door, turn the hot water on, find the right amount of cold, then jump in. You’ve done that so many times it’s become a habit. Do you turn the hot or the cold on first? It can be assured you would turn the same tap on every time when you are in your shower. What we do time and time again becomes a habit – one of which we don’t even have to think about, our brains automatically do it themselves. Like driving, sport, and even relationships, our habits are our “auto-pilot” which dictate what we will do in situations we have encountered time and time again.

The next step to changing a habit is to determine what the habit is, and what triggers that habit. For instance, one of my habits is that if I’m feeling hungry, I open the fridge to look for some chocolate. In this scenario, the trigger is feeling hungry, and my habit is looking for chocolate. The trigger is the event which causes a particular habit to kick in. Once the trigger and the habit have been determined, you can move to the next step.

You now have the trigger and the habit. Next you need to determine what you want to happen when the trigger is activated. Let’s say instead of looking for chocolate when I get hungry, I would rather look for some fruit. I need to get my brain to refer to this habit of looking for fruit every time the trigger “feeling hungry” is activated, rather than looking for chocolate. There are a couple of steps to doing this. One, close your eyes. Imagine yourself as the trigger happens from a first person perspective. Two, now imagine yourself doing your new habit. Play this scene a couple of times in your head to get a good feel for it.

Now you have a feel for your new habit, it’s time to put it into action. Every time your trigger is activated, you need to do your new habit. It’s natural for the first couple of times to slip up and do your old habit. The trick is to make yourself consciously aware when your trigger is activated, that way you’ll be able to do your new habit. It’s said that it takes around 21 days to create a habit. In a month or so after doing your new habit every time the trigger is activated, it will become second nature and you won’t have to even think about it. Presto! New habit created !