How does it suit you?

Imagine your wardrobe has clothes you keep wearing because they’re so much part of your identity you don’t notice you’ve outgrown them. Pants that are too short. A shirt that won’t button. Shoes with holes in them. You are uncomfortable when you wear them, but when someone points out to you that these clothes don’t fit you any more, you reply: “Oh, but these are so ME!”.

That would be a little silly, wouldn’t it?

This is how we can hold onto habits that we’ve outgrown—we defend them as deeply ingrained aspects of personality, rather than seeing them as old thinking that we’ve outgrown and can replace.

Consider these phrases:

“This is ingrained in me” 

“I’m wired like that” 

“It’s in my DNA to…”

“It’s what I always do!”

Do you find yourself using any of those phrases? Notice how they assert that the way you think is inalterable. 

Even just saying “it’s hard to change my habits” is thinking your habits are calcified in you, rather than something you can replace. And if you’re using that kind of language on yourself, you may be using it on other people too. This identification with habits gives them a power of permanence they don’t have in reality. A more empowering way to lead your life is to kill the language of permanence, and treat habits as impermanent items like clothes.

Whatever you wear or however you think, you’re still you—and what’s possible in life is to choose your clothes and your habits to suit who you really are, and how you want to lead your life today. That’s the work we help you do.

This is not an argument for taking lightly the power of self-examination and transformation. But it is an argument for loosening your grip on old habits. They die hard when we think we’ll die without them.

To making a mind that suits you, 

Tom and team

P.S. The word “habit” comes from the old English for clothing. You can still see this in the notion of a monk’s habit.