subject: Break Bad Habits By Establishing New Priorities [print this page] Is it possible to free yourself from bad habits? Can people really change in any meaningful and long-lasting way? Can I change myself? The answer to each of these questions is "yes." But you can't change in 24 hours, as some programs and self-help books promise. Anyone can change but they need a compelling reason to do so.
What does it mean to change? To change means to establish new priorities-to choose a behavior that's different from the one we're using now.
David Lucero is a 60 year old man who has been living on the streets for 3 months. He is losing his hearing, is mentally ill, unable to take care of himself, unable to cope with the business of life. He knows where he wants to go: he wants to go to El Paso Texas.
One day I tried to take him to a shelter for the homeless. All he had to do was come with me. He had to decide to come with me or stay on the street. The right decision could have started a cycle of healing and change, but it was more than David was capable of doing that morning. He decided to stay on the street, waiting for his imaginary ride to El Paso.
David was waiting for a solution that didn't exist. When a real solution was right in front of his nose, he couldn't see it.
I don't know when his hearing started to deteriorate. And even though he can see, I have a feeling that he has been blind for many years. I don't know the story of his life, but I suspect it is a story of bad habits and bad decisions.
I'm sure it's a story filled with bad people and bad situations, too. But at some point we have to discard the factors, the people, and the situations that shaped us. Focusing on the past won't help us solve today. At some point we have to take responsibility for our own lives.
I suspect that bad habits and bad choices are what brought David to this point-day after day and year after year-until he hit rock bottom. That's always the way it is.
Learning how to free yourself from bad habits starts with the realization that we cause our own feelings. I am the major cause of my own problems. The moment I grasp that simple fact, I'm ready to step into the process of self-change that will lead to freedom from the habits that keep me from living a more satisfying life. And when I'm free from my bad habits, the people around me will be free from the person I used to be.
All people can bring about superficial changes in themselves. But freeing yourself from a self-destructive habit like smoking or overeating requires a deep, long-lasting change. A bad habit is like an iceberg. You can't beat the habit if you approach it as if it were only as large as what you can see on the surface.
Franz Kafka said, "a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us." Any book or program that aims to help people break bad habits must reveal the whole iceberg that lies below the surface.
You can't eliminate the whole thing in one day, but if you take a step-by-step approach, you can eliminate the bad habit sooner than you thought possible. It is going to take effort on your part.
David has constructed a verbal cage for himself. His definition of the problem seems to give him no choice; he avoids having to take responsibility for himself. To receive the benefits that come with daily meals, hot showers, clean clothes, a bed, medical attention, companionship, and as much help as a social worker can give him he must break out of the cage.
But David is convinced that he cannot go to the shelter, for doing so would mean that he might miss his ride to El Paso. That is how people get trapped in verbal cages of their own making.
David isn't conscious of the elaborate mechanisms he has constructed to hide the truth from himself, but he is hiding it all the same. To free ourselves from bad habits, we must stop hiding the truth from ourselves.
Overeaters, smokers, and chronic procrastinators have more in common with people like David than meets the eye. We all go to great lengths to hide the truth from ourselves about the destructive nature of our bad habits; too often, lives and families are destroyed before we become aware of the verbal cages that keep us trapped in self-destructive behavior.
Does professional therapy work? Can it help people break bad habits before the habit destroys their lives? The dropout rate is astonishing: 45% of clients who seek a professional therapist drop out of therapy after two or three sessions.
Do programs help? Millions of smokers have quit forever without following a treatment program. On the other hand, many people who try a smoking-cessation program are not able to quit, no matter how many different programs they try.
Some research suggests that for every person who quits smoking by following a treatment program, there are almost twenty persons who quit on their own.
What conclusion should we draw from all of this? It's pretty clear, I think. You have a better chance of freeing yourself from a bad habit by becoming your own coach, by taking responsibility for your own program.
The goal of this report is to give you the information and strategy that will empower you to free yourself from bad habits. Millions of people have succeeded in breaking a bad habit, and so can you.
