Who Am I?
I am your constant companion. I am your greatest helper or heaviest burden. I will push you onward or drag you down to failure. I am completely at your command. Half of the things you do you might as well turn over to me and I will do them – quickly and correctly.
I can easily be managed – you must merely be firm with me. Show me exactly how you want something done and after a few lessons, I will do it automatically. I am the servant of all great individuals and, alas, of all failures as well. Those who are great, I have made great. Those who are failures, I have made failures.
I am not a machine though I work with the precision of a machine plus the intelligence of a human. You may run me for profit or run me for ruin – it makes no difference to me.
Take me, train me, be firm with me, and I will place the world at your feet. Be easy with me and I will destroy you.
Who am I? I am Habit.
What exactly are habits?
Habits are things we do repeatedly. But most of the time we’re hardly aware that we even have them.
Habits are good, bad or don’t really matter. Depending on what they are, our habits will either make us or break us.
Luckily you are stronger than your habits.
Try this exercise:
Sit back and with your hands empty, cross your arms across your chest.
Now undo them back to relaxed position.
Now cross them the opposite way. Feels pretty strange?
But if you folded them in the opposite way for 30 days in a row, it wouldn’t feel so strange. You wouldn’t even have to think about it.
You’d get in the habit.
At any time you can look yourself in the mirror and say, “Hey, I don’t like that about myself,” and you can exchange a bad habit for a better one. It may not always be easy, but it is always possible.
Habits and self-trust interweave. If you’d like to explore your degree of self-trust, stay posted – next week’s article will include a Self-Trust Quiz and what you can do to begin to honour the agreements you keep with yourself, as much as you would honour those you keep with others.