Fifty-two Week Challenge: Week 3

Habit: a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up.

Have you noticed how many people make New Year's resolutions and fail to follow through with them? By this time of year, merely three weeks into the new one, most people have already abandoned their new goals. Many have never even started.

Why is that? The easy answer is because it is hard. It is hard to break old ways of doing things and start new ones. And if you try to break old ways of doing things, you can simply fall back into past practices. It is just plain comfortable to continue doing things the old way. But change often involves discomfort; growth, however, requires it.

So this week, we need to be a little uncomfortable; we need to try something new to move forward. The uncomfortable feeling won't last for long if we build upon it. How do we do that? We make it a habit.

We have plenty of habits, some good, some bad. We are looking to replace the bad ones with new ones that will move us in the direction of our dreams. So take a minute now and think of your yearly goals. Are all of your habits moving you toward achievement of those dreams? Does watching TV for three to four hours a day move you toward being more physically fit? Does eating dessert after lunch and dinner help you lose weight? Or, does surfing the web over and over help you write that book?

We must start breaking bad habits and replacing them with good ones this week. Take small steps. Cut your dessert in half this week and try to cut it again next week. Start walking or jogging; a small distance at first, and increase the distance a small amount weekly. Don't check your e-mails as often; instead, write a few paragraphs. Look at you monthly benchmarks from last week and develop new weekly habits to achieve them.

It is the little things that are done consistently over time that will yield big results. New habits take time to become the normal. Before long, you will be new person with a new way of doing things. It just takes a little perseverance. Start now.


"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." -Aristotle