You can’t see a habit at a hundred miles an hour.

Part two in a series on habits.

In our last newsletter, we argued that practice does not make perfect, it makes a way of thinking persistent. Some of that habitual thinking worsens your life, some improves it. Knowing the difference and making a change is what we address in coaching. And the real challenge is not in changing habits—but in seeing them in time to change them.  

A habit is a neural pathway that we’ve taken before—a series of thoughts that left a faint imprint on our brain after we made them. Here’s an analogy: Imagine you walk across snow on your way through the woods to a friend’s house. The next time you walk through the woods, you’ll see your footprints and be inclined to follow them. There are thousands of other paths you could take. But the one you take is the one you made earlier because you see it more quickly. 

This quickness to see a previous path is what makes our thinking habitual. We quickly see the neural pathway we once took, so we take it again. The more we take it, the more we make that path visible. Haste reinforces this process: the more we rush, the more we rely on familiar paths. The result is that we reinforce old habits and miss things in life.

As an analogy, have you ever had the experience of speeding along a familiar road, only to realize that you’re going where you don’t want to go, and you missed your exit? Any signs—off ramps, different routes or warning signs—are hard to see at speed. They are all still there, but you are going too fast to see them or question the path you’re on. So it is with our habits of mind.

This is why one of the phrases we repeat the most to clients is “slow down”. When you slow down you create a space to observe what you’re doing or thinking—you can now see that you’re on a path that you made. You can choose to stay on it, or take an exit and explore others that you’ve never considered. Some of those other paths, when you make a habit of them, will make your life immeasurably better. 

Does that sound attractive to you? 

To slowing down and seeing more,

Tom and team