the habits behind your habits

I want to teach you about the most important habits you have that aren’t on your radar because they are your radar. Trippy right? Before we get there, let’s lay out the whole habit landscape.

First, I’ll define a habit as a choice you make a lot. Some choices we know we make and others we don’t. How can we make a choice when we don’t know we are? It happens when we react. I’m still calling it a choice because it isn’t the only way to respond, it’s just the way you learned to react. That means you can change it — so there is a choice. Before we go more into that, I’ll break habits into 3 categories:

Habits of action

These are the ones you probably think about when someone says ‘habit.’ They’re choices we can see, hear, or measure.

• Ex: mowing the lawn, drinking water, going to work, fighting with your spouse, hitting snooze, journaling

Habits of thought

These are the invisible ones behind your habits of action. These are choices you can’t see. Some of them you may notice and some are the habits BEHIND *how* and *why* you notice things. I’ll get into them in more detail later, but here are the main thought choice categories:

How we:

• interpret the world & assign meaning. Eg. judgments you make about what’s going on & how it relates to you.
• direct our focus. Eg. topics you think and talk about.
• use language. Eg. the actual words you choose to describe your experience & communicate.
• interact with information. Eg. your brand of analysis & patterns for discerning what information is legit.

Habits of being

These are choices we’re taught to make in what to believe about life, ourselves, and others. They’re behind the habits of thought, which makes them also behind the habits of action and invisible, too. That means if these ones are ‘right’ everything after them (thinking & action habits) falls into place. I’d go right there except that most of us have habits of thinking that prevent letting habits of being seem like enough to ‘fix’ their problems, so these will be covered in a later paper.

Within each of those categories, there are two types:

• habits we notice
• habits we don’t notice

Let’s talk about why the habits behind your habits might matter to you. You can think of it like this — Some habits stand out as important, like exercising or staying true to your word. Yes, those are big ones & have all kinds of ripple effects. Still, there are other choices that get less reverence & can’t be seen, but are more important (yes! I said it) than even those major ones in determining the quality of your life, relationships, & health.

The habits of thinking & being behind your actions are what really direct the course of your life. They are the unseen habits that “tell you” what’s happening & what you could do about it.

Here’s an example:

Imagine two people in a brand-new relationship. Sal & Jolie. People don’t generally think about relationships as places to look at habits, but they are. Our relationships are products of patterns of choice we make in acting, thinking, & being. The quality of our relationships reflects back to us the quality of these choices.

Let’s look closer — Sal says he’ll take Jolie to mini-golf next week. He doesn’t bring it up again & neither does she because she thinks he should. They don’t go mini-golfing. Jolie feels sad & mad. She can’t stop thinking about how he could do that. She starts to question if Sal cares about her. She wonders if she should go without him so he sees she doesn’t need him or if she should tell him she’s mad he let her down.

She sees some choices: A) Go without him. B) Tell him she’s mad. C) Do nothing & store the disappointment away in her mind.

What she probably doesn’t see are the choices of interpretation or assumptions she made before those options appeared. She made choices (although she didn’t notice she did) about how to interpret what happened & she also made choices about what is acceptable for her to do given that interpretation. Behind what she’s thinking she made reactionary choices about love, who she is, & what she can expect from others & life.

Habits of thought and being create our life experience.

If you haven’t been able to create the results you want or change behaviors, it’s likely these invisible ones you need to address.

Think you might need to rework some of your invisible habits? You can schedule an info call to talk with me about what that would be like and do for you. I build & facilitate customized programs for clients to transform all categories of their habits. Learn more about packages here. I’m also available for single sessions here.

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