A great thanks to the 3 chambers, Beluxcham, CEEC and Portugal Vietnam for the opportunity to engage into a meaningful conversation on the topic “What does it take to break and build habits?” – a well known and documented topic, yet elusive to many of us; the intention was to explore what truly gets in the way; we used tools to gather collective intelligence in a few occasions but more importantly engaged into conversations; this topic is inherently personal; each of us has to look at what works, his / her own way of functioning. We saw that the whole spectrum of emotions is being experienced when people think about building or breaking emotions, from feeling happy, motivated and relaxed to the other side of the spectrum with emotions like stress, anger, fear, out of control, pfff!, insecure and afraid. Overall, the theme seems to draw more negative emotions than positive ones. Three main factors emerge as main contributors to preventing us to manage our habits more effectively:
(a) Lack of commitment,
(b) Lack of discipline,
(c) Our fear of failure.
We had time to touch on four angles to approach those challenges most of us face at some point::
(1) In line with Dan Heath and his book “Switch”, focusing your attention on the emotional aspects, in particular the impact, positive and / or negative, more than the rationale aspects will help ,
(2) We saw that discipline is only available in very finite quantities in us and what really is required
of us is to slow down and deconstruct our auto-pilot in order to raise awareness on our patterns and find the “space” where a decision can be made, as Viktor Frankl reminds us in “Man’s search for meaning”,
(3) Giving yourself time is essential; not doing it is like shooting yourself in the foot…indeed changing habits equates to rewiring the neuro-pathways our brain which just takes time and requires a lot of reminders and feedback along the way.
(4) The more we can enroll our environment including our stakeholders the better; people around us don’t like consciously or not, when we change, they expect us the way we always have been…, plus showing someone that you can change and make an important decision can be confronting for him / her; you want people around you on YOUR side, not AGAINST you!
In my opinion, Steven Pressfield understood with a rare clarity what is preventing us to live the “unloved life within us”: resistance. Most of the challenges we face above is in one way or another a “resistance”. Surprisingly, there are ways to overcome those, it is not easy but do able; the first step is to truly realize how much we have been letting ourselves being victim of this resistance.
This is the work we do with individuals and teams; helping the person and the team realize what gets in the way and deal with it.
If interested to explore more, reach out.
