24 Mar Expert Shares the Secret to Easily Changing Habits for Good–No Willpower Required
Habits are vitally important for happiness and life success.
But changing habits for happiness, or anything else for that matter, is often seen as a difficult and challenging task that requires great willpower.
Well, what if you could create happiness habits with NO willpower? If that sounds interesting then read on …
via Inc.com by Kelly Main
The simple way to elicit change effortlessly.
It’s hard to change habits.
We all know that.
We know we might want to change. We might even know we really need to change. But we don’t know how to change a habit.
After all, a habit is an automatic response, a memorized behavior or an unconscious emotional reaction (if you will) that we default to without giving much thought. In a sense, it’s the mind on auto-pilot mode.
We reach for the doughnut with our coffee. We flop onto the couch after a long day despite today’s being the day we were going to start exercising after work. We hit the snooze button regardless of our best intention to wake up early.
We repeat the same patterns of behavior today as we did yesterday, the day before that, the week before that, and the year before that.
Changing habits involves essentially reprogramming our default mode. To do so, we assume it takes tremendous willpower or superhuman discipline (something millions of us fear we don’t have). But this isn’t so.
In fact, making powerful habit changes–the type that holds the power to change your life–doesn’t require vast amounts of discipline or willpower, says behavioral change expert and New York Times bestselling author James Clear.
During an interview with Lewis Howes, the host of The School of Greatness podcast, Clear shared a far more effective way to forge new habits for good that does not involve discipline or require willpower.
The desire to belong impacts our ability to forge new habits
Psychologically, humans have a deeply rooted desire to belong, says Psychology Today. Deep within our subconscious psyche is the innate desire to be accepted by our peers, social circles, and communities at large.
Most of us want to feel as though we are a part of something bigger than ourselves. It’s why the strangest method to beat burnout and increase employee happiness is also the most effective. But this very desire for belonging impacts our ability to change our habits–for better or worse.
When our social circles influence our behavior, decisions, and habits, those we surround ourselves with make all the difference. And when it comes to changing patterns of behavior and creating new habits, your environment (and those you are surrounded by) impact whether making your habit changes is very difficult or very easy…
… keep reading the full & original article HERE