I had a wonderful friend in Atlanta, the late Dr. Jay Dishman, who wrote an excellent article about habits. I've never read anything that rang with such truth, and I'd like to share it with you:

"Recently I visited Alcatraz prison, which once housed the most hardened of criminals. Today, it's open to tours under the direction of the United States Parks Department. Many men tried to escape Alcatraz; no one is known to have succeeded. As I listened to the tour guide explain the impossibility of escape, I thought of other prisons equally as confining as Alcatraz, but where the doors are never locked; no guards walk the halls, and escape is encouraged and possible. That prison is Habit."

For each of us, an entrenched habit is either a jail cell or a paradise.

The sad fact is that more people are confined by their thoughts than are freed by them. We need only to look around us to see people who are rich emotionally and materially because they think and feel rich. Yet, we see even more people who are laden with emotional and material debt because they think and feel poor. Some are inspired with vision, others are encumbered with doubt. Some are moved by ambition, others feel safer in monotony. Some seek opportunity, some wait fruitlessly for it to knock.

Habits deserve a considerable amount of attention, because they can most certainly make or break us. Habits are ideas that are fixed like cement in our sub-conscious mind. These ideas might have been laid down by someone else when we were mere infants, or we could have "poured" them into our mind ourselves. Nevertheless, they are ideas that control our lives and, thus, control our resultant behavior.

Think about it for a moment. The culture in which you live is founded on habits, work practices, attitudes, beliefs and expectations - otherwise known as paradigms. Armed with paradigms or habits, you approach and react to the world around you, interpreting what you see and experience according to your shared understandings and culturally determined guidelines.

Negative habits are capable of locking our imagination, gifts and potential in a jail cell as inescapable as Alcatraz.

But there is a way out. Just before his death, J. Paul Getty, one of the world's wealthiest men, said, "The individual who wants to reach the top in business must appreciate the might of the force of habit - and must understand that practices are what create habits. He must be quick to break those habits that can break him - and hasten to adopt those practices that will become the habits that help him achieve the success he desires."

Your marvelous mind once had the power - however negatively it was directed - to create your worst habits, ingraining them so deeply that they actually began to direct and steer the "puppet strings" of your behavior and physical body.

Your marvelous mind has the same ability and power (even moreso when it's applied in a positive vibration) to turn the key in that rusty lock that sets you free of your own Alcatraz of habits.

Activity:

1. Get very specific about one bad habit and write it down. Don't just write, "I'm late to everything." Write "I'm late WHEN I . . ." or "I have this habit of being late or tardy BECAUSE I feel . . ." Then, write about how it makes you feel to take part in this bad habit.
2. Now, write the exact opposite of that habit and state the rewards you'll receive as a result of adopting that good habit.
3. Then, writing in present tense, write your new habit on a 3x5 index card (or smaller) in wording such as: "I am so happy and grateful now that I am arriving five minutes in advance of the time I'm supposed to be somewhere. I feel better prepared and more upbeat, and the people I meet are so appreciative of the fact that I value their time as much as I do my own. It's easy showing up on time because I've done this, this and this to make it so." Carry this card with you, and read from it as often as you can. Memorize and say it out loud in your car 20 times a day as you commute to work.
4. At the same time, actually implement at least one or two steps of action that you've already created as part of the solution in your affirmation. Perform these actions consistently, every day, so that you'll further imbed this new habit in your marvelous mind.
5. Lastly, make yourself perform the actions of this new habit just 21 days in a row. Absolutely no excuses. (After all, what's 21 days in a lifetime?)
6. In that 21 days, keep a nightly journal where you note when and how you performed the new habit. You'll see that the number of instances increases by the day, and you'll be rewarding your conscious and subconscious mind with positive self-esteem and anticipation of the next day of good habit!

-- Bob Proctor