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One of the most commonly asked questions in the world of personal development is how people can change their bad habits into good habits. They are always looking for a shortcut, an easy way out. The idea of practicing their self discipline over and over just isn’t a happy one. They want a quick and dirty tip for getting from where they are, to where they want to be. Well, you know how I feel about short cuts, but what I’m going to tell you is about the closest I’ll ever come to a quick and dirty tip to a better you. If you want to put a stop to your less desirable habits and put your shoulder into creating better, more productive habits, keep reading. Trust me when I say that this will be easier than you ever thought possible.

The Creature from the Habit Lagoon

There is no better way to describe the human animal than as a creature of habit. We create habits for ourselves because it is the most efficient way to live our lives. If we didn’t have a system for our small and seemingly insignificant tasks, we would waste incredible amounts of time and energy deciding when and how to do something as simple as sleep. Instead of allowing these types of tasks to be regulated by the whim of the conscious mind, we’ve evolved to create patterns, or programs, that will take over and decide these things for us. You witnessed this in your own life numerous times. The more you consistently go to sleep at the same time every night, the more you will consistently feel sleepy at that time. Your body generates automated programs to run most of its functions and the basis of these programs is whatever has come before. The more you sleep at the same time, the more likely you are to sleep at that time and the harder it will become not to.

This is actually the nature of addiction and, I believe, the more pressing of the factors that make addictions so hard to break. When you consistently respond to a stimulus in a certain way, the harder it will become to stop responding in that same way. When you feel the itch in the back of your head that tells you that you want a cigarette, you go out for a smoke. The more you respond to this itch by smoking the more your brain trains itself to act in this way. So on the day you decide not to smoke anymore, the difficulty comes – not so much from the addictive properties of nicotine – but from your ingrained need to complete your routine. There is no doubt that nicotine is addictive, but I think your own reaction to previous stimuli holds more power over you than a chemical dependency. You’ve felt the stimulus and now you need a cigarette to complete the habit. Without it you feel incomplete and, more to the point, you feel physically terrible. This will not be the case with harder drugs, but weaker dependencies like caffeine and nicotine will be ruled more by human born habits than chemicals. The habit of smoking a pack of cigarettes a day is the same as any other habit, it just has the virtue of being a habit that can be reinforced or “anchored” more than twenty times during the course of a day. A habit that strong has a powerful momentum to get beyond.

What we want to do is create a habit for success that is this strong. Does this mean you’ll have to reinforce it twenty or more times a day? If you can, yes, that would be ideal, but let’s try for five to ten.

Drop the Anchor, We’ve Spotted Success!

Anchoring is nothing new, when Pavlov rang a bell and dropped some food, he was anchoring a habit of salivating on cue into his canine test subjects. This is what you need to do to yourself. When you start thinking about the habits you have now, you’ll see that you’ve anchored them without knowing it. Let’s say that when you are unhappy, you crave chocolate. This is an anchored response. You’ve taught your body that when it feels the stimulus of unhappiness, the hunched shoulders, the emptiness in the stomach, that it should respond by desiring chocolate. If you workout in the gym everyday while listening to the same music, you’ll begin to find that hearing that same music at any other time will illicit the same biological responses of getting you pumped up and ready to work. When I was a kid I anchored terrible feelings to a song that haunts me to this day and funny thing is that I never meant to do it.

When I was just starting high school, I had an alarm that allowed me to play a song to wake me up. I choose an upbeat song that I thought would get me excited every morning. Well, after a few weeks of waking up feeling exhausted and horrible, all the while listening to that song, I began to realize that hearing that song at any other time during the day caused me to feel exhausted and unhappy. If you’ve ever wondered why you hate the sound of your alarm clock, this is why. All I had to do was change the song and I changed the stimulus, but to this day I can’t hear that song without calling up the same old responses. I cringe every time I hear that song, even years later.

This type of anchoring is what you need to do to create a new habit for yourself, you just need to be more careful about what you anchor than I was. Let’s say that you hate meeting new people, you get nervous and don’t know what to say. This happens because over the years you have anchored feelings of fear and discomfort with the stimuli of meeting new people. To correct this problem, we simply have to create a new response to the same stimulus.

The Steps to Anchoring New Habit:

1.Imagine the Reaction You Want to Have: start by imagining a time when you were calm, cool and collected, when you met someone new and didn’t feel nervous you felt in control and interesting. Imagine, in the greatest detail possible a time when you felt just the way you wish to feel. If you’ve never experienced it, then pretend, make up a time when this happened to you and create the images and feelings with as much detail as possible. It is very important that you physically feel the sensations of you desired habit because it is that physicality that you are going to anchor. When you feel that these sensations have reached their height and are as strong as they can be, move on to the next step.

2.Pick an Anchor: in the case of meeting someone new, I would suggest you get a friend to help you with anchoring your habit. The anchor, or the trigger, is the stimulus that will illicit your new, desired responses. At the moment, you have anchored meeting someone new with feelings of nervousness and self consciousness. Now you must anchor meeting new people with feelings of confidence and ease.

I would suggest using a handshake and you saying a firm “Hello” as your anchor. This way every time you shake someone’s hand and say “Hello” in that certain way, you will create the same feelings of confidence. No matter what anchor you choose, or who you have to help you, try to create your anchor by combining at least two sensations. Use two or more of your senses as this will make the anchor stronger. Combine a smell and a touch, a sound and touch, a sound and a taste. These will engage more of your brain and body in the anchoring process. This is why I suggest a handshake(touch) and you saying “Hello”(sound). Not only is this a trigger that you will encounter in everyday life, but it also engages two of your senses at once. Remember that we are trying to anchor emotional responses through physical stimuli.

A Note on Anchors: Your anchors must be the same every time; consistency is key in this process. When you shake hands and say hello, you must shake hands the same way every time and say hello with the same tone and inflection. This won’t be so important once your habit has been properly anchored but, while you are creating this habit, consistency is the most important thing to remember. Anchor it the same way every single time, you patience will be rewarded.

3.Lather, Rinse, Repeat: Do this over and over again as many times as you can stand it. The more you consistently anchor your emotions with your triggers, the more quickly you’ll see the results. Stand with your friend and imagine meeting someone new for the first time. Imagine feeling confident and calm, imagine feeling interesting and charming. When you feel these emotions in your body reach their peak, confidently stretch out your hand, shake you partner’s and say “Hello.” Repeat the process until you begin to feel the emotional effects come more easily. And don’t be shy about testing it out to see how you’re doing. Let your practice rest for a day or so, then just try shaking someones hand and saying your practiced “Hello.” You’ll find that even after only a few short practice sessions, you’ll begin to feel the new sensations taking hold. And the more you practice the stronger the habit will become, until you no longer need to even think about it. Your reaction will become perfectly natural.

I’ll talk more about anchoring and how you can more easily put it to use in your life in my next update. For now, I hope you will try the system I’ve outlined above. It seems deceptively simple because it is such a short process but I guarantee it’s effectiveness. Try it yourself for just a day and you’ll begin to feel its potential to change your life. Until the next update, enjoy this clip from Mind Control with Derren Brown in which he anchors the effects of alcohol with an actual drink. Say what you will about the reality of the trick, but watch closely the anchoring techniques Derren uses such as the repetition of physical sensations, repeatedly touching the subject and an anchor word. Until next time . . .

You are a creator. You were born a creator. Your one desire, above all other things is to create something, anything, that pleases you. We all have the need to belong, to survive, to find happiness, but beyond all of those survival urges lies another urge that transcends the logic of the human form. We can explain the need for company. We can explain the need to for food and water. We can even explain the need to feel good. What we can’t explain is the need for self-expression that lies inside all of us. We think of ourselves as practical and logical and in many ways we are, but the need for what we call self-expression doesn’t fit into either of those categories. It is a mysterious desire and yet a desire that makes us happy. We are all creative, whether we think we are or not. We may not paint or write or craft, but we are all creative because it is through this self expression that we are able to find our true happiness.

You Hate Results Because They Get in the Way of Success

You hate results, you just don’t think you do. The truth is that results aren’t what we’re after in life. In fact, we find them fairly boring. Oh sure, they seem all bright and shiny at first but once we finally achieve them, the moment is fleeting and in the end we realize that we had more fun on the journey than the destination. It’s the possibility of success that drives man forward, not the actual success. We don’t really need actual success to make ourselves feel good about life, we only need to know that there is the chance for that success. We need something to work toward, we need some ladder to struggle up. Stagnation isn’t good for us, we whither and die. What’s more, results actually hinder our enjoyment of the success we do find.

Ever met those people who had a goal to loose fifteen pounds but only lost ten and now feel the need to complain about that fact? We all know them and that’s just what I’m talking about. They technically achieved what they set out to achieve, they lost weight, but because they were too focused on their results, they are overlooking their real victory.

Many times you’ll hear that you should have an ending in mind before you begin any creative endeavor and that’s true. People tell you that you should begin with the end in mind so that you will have something toward which you can work. This is sound advice but most people don’t do it correctly. When they start, say, a painting, do they visualize the end result of paint on canvas? Yes, but they don’t stop there, for them that isn’t the end. They visualize all of the ways in which they are going to make hundred of dollars or get “discovered” based on this one painting. This is where they go wrong. The end result of the painting, was putting paint to canvas. Selling it or being discovered was the beginning of a new and separate journey. By confusing these two, you’ve taken the creative energy out of the painting and placed it solely on whether or not people will like it or whether or not it will sell where it definitely where it doesn’t belong. This hurts your projects and it hurts you.

Beware the Pull of Success

Success, whatever that word may mean for you, is great but it is not a goal. Too many people want to become an actor for reasons that don’t include, “Because I want to act.” Too many people want to become singers for reasons other than, “Because I want to sing.” Those should have been the only reasons necessary to make those decisions, but they became muddled and complicated by the idea of money, success, fame and failure. We start taking energy away from the crafts of acting and singing and placing them squarely where they don’t belong.

I know there are many people who will say that we have to know what kind of success we want to achieve if we ever expect to find it and this is true, but success is not a goal. It isn’t that success isn’t a good goal or an admirable goal. It’s that success isn’t a goal at all. Goals must be quantifiable and they must have a set path that can be walked from point A to point B. I look at goals like a race; there’s a starting line, a finish line and a clear path to run in between. Everyone might take a slightly different track, but they all take a clear path.

A Goal Must:

1.Be Quantifiable: You must be able to say to what extent your goal will reach. If it’s a number, you must be able to state that number.
2.Have Clearly Defined Steps: You’ve got to be able to see exactly how you will get to your destination.
3.Must Have a Consistent Path: Your goal cannot follow a process that only works occasionally or for certain people.

Let’s take this example:
If you wanted to lose, say, thirty pounds what would you do? You would probably find a good diet, find a good gym and start using both consistently. This is a good goal to have because you’ll know when you’ve achieved it, you’ll know how close you are to achieving it every step of the way and you can see precisely how you are going to get from one point to another. There is never any inconsistency on your path, either. If you take the diet and exercise road, taking no detours along the way, you must get results. You’ll never run the race only to realize that you crossed the wrong finish line. It works every time without fail, no matter who you are.

Fame, success, or “striking it rich,” don’t work that way, they are missing a lot of the qualities that make a goal. Sure, we can quantify it by saying how successful we want to be or how much money we want to make, but that’s it. We have a starting line and a finish line, but there’s no clear way of getting from one to the other. It’s as if someone planted an entire forest in the middle of your race track, you could barrel through the trees all you wanted but you might end up miles from the finish line. There is no clearly defined way of getting there from here and certainly no consistent way of doing so. One person may find a path to riches, but the same path never seems to work twice. This inconsistency just won’t fly when it comes to making goals. If it only works once, it’s not a plan, it’s not a goal, it’s a fluke.

The way I remember it is that if it is an end results that someone could accidentally stumble upon, it’s not a goal. Someone could win the lottery and get rich over night, seemingly by accident. If someone “accidentally” loses thirty pounds, we’ll still know why. It’s because their body burned more calories than it took in. There is no mystery in that. If you could right me a step by step map of how to achieve my goal that would work every time without fail, it’s a goal. If you can’t do that, it’s just not a goal at all.

Success Has Its Place

I don’t want you think that I’m telling you that success isn’t a good, or admirable thing to strive for because I would never say anything of the sort. What I am saying is that turning your focus on something that has no clear path will only serve to get in your way. If the dollar signs come to your eyes before you’ve created your masterpiece, you’re focusing on the wrong thing. Artistic energy is not the same as the energy is takes to sell your creations. If you’re an artist who sells his own paintings, there is nothing wrong with wanting to get paid well for your work. The trick is to make sure that you are keeping those two portions of your life separate. When you are creating you are creating, when you are selling you are selling and the ne’er the twain shall meet.

Keep success in it’s place. Keep creation in it’s place. You and success will meet in the middle, so long as you are focusing on creating something that provides value to the world. If you spend most of your day contemplating the millions you are going to make, or trying to get your mind “financially abundant,” then do yourself a favor and get to work. Use that spark of creation and stop letting your mind be crowded and overrun by thoughts of success, money, and fears of failure. There is a time for all that meditation and attraction and it’s well after you’ve cleaned up the paint and framed that latest masterpiece.

Author’s Note: I don’t usually recommend other sites to my readers because I’m extremely picky when it comes to great content. That said, if I recommend it, you know it’s top-notch stuff. If you’re interested in balancing your creative side with your business side, go take a look at Christine Kane’s blog at www.christinekane.com/blog. I love Christine’s music and her writing. I raved about her on The Alchemist and I’m doing so again. If you’re an artist, or even just like to think of yourself as creative, Christine’s site is for you and I would happily send you to her
–D.R.