Saturday morning before noon and I have already done so many things!! On any other Saturday, I would still be sitting on the couch, curled up with a book, a cup of coffee, and a kitty but not this morning. Don't get me wrong, that's a lovely scenario, but I realize that my escapist tendencies have stolen a lot of hours away from my life. Oh yes, I love to read (honestly, it can be an addiction), but there's a difference between reading something that is enlightening and something that allows me to avoid my life. In all truth, I've done way more of the latter than the former.
One of the things I did read this morning (with a self-imposed limit on the amount of time spent) was how embodying a habit takes way longer than I had been led to believe in the past. I always had read that if you did something for 21 days or 30 days that what you were working on would be instilled as a habit. Evidently, I was wrong. 😳 So when I look back on how my habit instilling had gone in the past, I could see where I never quite got to that sweet spot and gave up before I had really even gotten started.
According to the research from University College London, it takes a minimum of 66 days of training to make that new habit stick. Whoa!!! That's a lot longer than 21 or 30 days. (Now I'm not feeling quite so miserable for not getting things right in the past.)
In all actuality, the first 22 days are the "Destruction" phase. In this stage, you are undoing/rewriting past patterns that your mind has held onto so dearly in order to protect you. (Say thank you and move forward.) You are also destroying old ways of operating and releasing deeply ingrained habits.
Gravity pulls hard (and you can read that as literal gravity or the gravity of the situation you are trying to change.) In order to overcome the earth's gravity, a rocket ship expends huge amounts of fuel to overcome the earth's gravitational pull and to reach escape velocity. In other words, you will spend a whole lot of energy to break through your inertia. Just because it hasn't worked in the past, doesn't mean that it can't work now. It helps that I made myself accountable to all of you 💝, so grab a buddy and make it happen!
"Continue at all costs. Persistence sits at the threshold of mastery."
