I’ve often heard myself, heck I have heard many of you as well, say that I am so busy, but its a good thing. Wow, is it really inspirational – or are we just fooling ourselves?
If we throw a bit of poison into our favourite dish, it will probably taste good – BUT it will still be pretty much poison for us. And that is what I have come to realise is what being busy actually is to us.
I used to be all kinds of busy – but if I reflected on it – it wasn’t good busy – so I decided to change and together with my coach we made some changes.
Fast forward to now, and go figure, I am still busy – and yes if I had to describe it – its all kinds of good busy – but it is still BUSY – so I think I pretty much missed the whole point which is not to replace BAD BUSY with GOOD BUSY – but just to get rid of the BAD BUSY š
Realising this is always a process which sounds much easier after the fact (also known as hindsight!) … the harder and more painfully resisting step is to actually change your habits. There has been loads of research done on this subject – people like Stephen Covey, Edward de Bono and many more. The general belief is that it takes around 21 days to build a habit. I am sure this depends on how much you resist it!
Ok so Iāve decided to become inspired to change this (lets call this a cognitive commitment). What happens next? Well we generally tend to expect that wow presto – all will now fall into place – and then we are sorely disappointed when it doesnt.
So what is missing? Well besides a magic wand and 21 days š There are two other key parts of us that need to learn how to change – our body and our emotions. Lets work through a hopefully practical and easy example to make this clearer.
I am going to use an example that shows the differences between the the parts of us that have to work together. Lets say you are wanting to create a pause before you speak to someone who makes you nervous. So you declare this intention to pause before speaking – that is what we call a ācognitiveā commitment. So off you go and what happens – most likely you donāt pause. And the reason why is because you havenāt taught your body or worked with your emotions to address this.
You would need to work with your coach on teaching your body (āsomaticā commitment) on how to create a pause e.g. physically taking a breath for instance. A tip here is also to practice this when you are calm and self-aware so that when you do become nervous its easier to access.
The other area to work on is your emotions (āemotionalā commitment) to develop an understanding of what is causing you to become nervous, how that shows up and what strategies can you develop and practice to help change this.
Once you are able to integrate these three (somatic, emotional and cognitive) it comes far easier to build that habit in 21 days.
Lets ace this š