Heroes Not Zombies

In the second part of the A to Z of Becoming, Q stands for the verb Quit.

I think change is inevitable and constant, but there are forces of conservation and continuity to. We are creatures of habit. If you’ve ever been to a two or three day course or workshop I’m sure you’ll have noticed how many people choose to sit in exactly the same seat in the classroom, or lecture theatre, every single day. These habits develop so quickly. Habits can be helpful tools. They can bring us the experience of continuity and the security which comes with that. They can also free us up to make choices about other things, not feel we have to choose everything every time. But habits can be traps and constraints to. We can become quite easily entangled in our habits and they can then become ruts, stuck loops, chains even.

If we want to become consciously involved in change, then we need to be able to develop new patterns of behaving and living….new habits. If we want new habits we might have to create the space for them to exist, by stopping some current habits! That’s where the verb, to quit comes in.

It’s pretty tricky to stop a habit. It can be hard to quit something, and we often get the feeling that the more we focus on what we want to quit, the more tenaciously we hang on to it! So, one  good way to quit something is to replace it with something else. If you create a new habit, a new pattern of eating, or exercising, say, or a new pattern of thinking, then the current habits “naturally” get replaced.

So, I think sometimes, we do need to grasp the nettle and choose to stop something. Choose to quit. But other times we need to approach the issue of quitting rather more obliquely…focusing on the creation of new patterns to allow the old ones to fade away.

What do you think? Is there something you want to stop doing, stop saying, stop thinking? Are you going to decide to quit that pattern? Do you want to change direction? Go ahead then. Make the decision. But you might find you manage to quit more easily by replacing the behaviour with another one which you consciously, deliberately, and preferably, enthusiastically choose!