You ever catch yourself playing “Whack-A-Mole” with your bad habits?
Whenever a bad habit pops up in your life, you whack it with whatever personal development tool is available to you…
Only to have that habit pop back up somewhere else in your life.
So you take another whack at it, only to have two more bad habits pop up somewhere else.
It’s a losing battle.
And it never ends.
Because you’re only ever telling yourself what you *don’t* want to be doing.
But you have to be doing something. We have ~16 waking hours a day to fill with activity, so, without a clear vision of where you actually want to go, and what habits would help you get there, you’ll just keep falling back on whatever habits you had before.
The way out of this game is to stop chasing your bad habits all together, and start replacing them with good habits.
The problem for a lot of people is, when they realize this, they also realize that they’ve never given much real thought to what they actually want.
For anyone who spent their whole life thinking only in terms of what they don’t want, this is a whole new way of thinking.
So it requires practice, like any new skill does.
But, when you start reminding yourself to think in terms of what you want – instead of what you don’t want – that way of thinking becomes a habit in and of itself.
It’s a very good mental habit to have, too. By developing it, you’re already starting to set a clear direction for the rest of your life course.
It soon becomes easier and easier to know what you want in any situation, because you have a clearer understanding of your true motivations and passions.
And with that understanding comes clearer goals that actually motivate you and encourage you, subconsciously, to develop whatever habits you need to reach those goals.
Your subconscious mind will gladly offer up whatever other good habits you require, if you just give it a clear goal.
Then you can stop worrying about your bad habits, because they’ll simply be replaced by all the new, useful habits you begin to manifest in your daily life.
This also means, however, that you’ll be left hanging every time you achieve all your goals.
The only way to stay consistently on track, for life, is to have a life-long goal.