The Power of Habit

"Resistance is like the Alien or the Terminator or the shark in 'Jaws'.  It cannot be reasoned with, it understands nothing but power."  Steven Pressfield in The War of Art

I’m really pleased to see that you are giving some thoughts to this idea of doing battle with resistance.  
One reader commented: “My biggest problem is how to be a warrior against resistance, and still maintain balance in my life.”
Another reader wrote: “I do think we somehow sabotage ourselves thinking we don't deserve greatness and do not really go forward in achieving it. But, why wouldn't we expect greatness from God? I’m thinking about putting on the full armor of God; Ephesians 6:10.”

The War of Art author, Steven Pressfield writes, "We're wrong if we think we're the only ones struggling with resistance." writes Pressfield,  "Everyone who has a body experiences resistance."

I've recently started reading a New York Times Bestseller by Charles Duhigg called, The Power of Habit.  Isn’t the title appropriate for our discussion on needing to be a strong warrior to defend ourselves against resistance?   Although Duhigg certainly didn’t mean for his topic to be a Segue from Pressfield’s message in The War of Art …I find myself continually going back and forth between the two books and fitting the pieces of the two messages together. 

In The Power of Habit, Duhigg uses a myriad of data collected through research studies, along with personal interviews and case studies to help the reader begin to grasp this idea that our habits hold a lot of answers to a successful or unsuccessful life, and as the subtitle suggests…'Why we do what we do in life and business'.

Our habits can be bad ones, as we are all certainly acquainted with.  We might reach for that cigarette right after every meal, or grab a handful of chips with that sandwich for lunch, we toss the dirty clothes on the floor, place the soda can out on the kitchen counter, or leave the toilet seat up.  We don’t really think about any of these things, we just do them…they are habits….bad habits.

But along with those bad habits, we also have the good habits that we have developed; habits such as brushing our teeth, putting on our seat belts, and saying our prayers.  Many of us can walk through our morning routines still half asleep.  We just do it unconsciously….almost as naturally as breathing.

Frankly, we don’t give our habits a lot of thought, do we? But did you know that other people give our habits a lot of thought?  Retail stores make billions of dollars from collecting data on us and analyzing our buying habits. Record companies study our listening habits and use that knowledge to launch new hits. Weight loss companies start advertising campaigns at just the perfect time of year, according to our habits, and rake in the business.   Retail and wholesale companies alike are paying statisticians in their marketing department six figure numbers in order to extract every piece of data they can about their customers' habits.  Even non-profits benefit from the knowledge of our habits. Political races are run and won using information about voters’ habits.  And did you know that some church leaders have used the knowledge of members' habits to create the largest mega churches in our country?  According to the author of The Power of Habit, a growing number of scientists are studying this powerful human behavior and the possible impact it can have on a person’s life.

As I am reading about the tremendous amount of money, time and energy that is spent studying my habits, I find myself feeling like an outsider…here these folks are using information about me, and I’m not in on it….hmmm.  Then I realized .…if all these groups are convinced that our habits hold the secret for their success, then why don’t we do our own research and see if that knowledge can benefit us as well?

And just in case you thought I was taking a left turn from our discussion on resistance….…I suspect that the more insight we gain into the power of habits, the more likely we can use that knowledge in our battle against resistance.  Let’s talk about it more next week. 

In the meantime, I'm going to pay closer attention to my habits, both good and bad, and I hope you'll do the same.

 Post your thoughts on the blog, or email me, Karen, at smallsteps4bigresults@yahoo.com or on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/karen.spencer.5283166?ref=tn_tnmn