Transition times in life are excellent opportunities to establish and nurture good habits. They are also dangerous times when it comes to establishing bad habits. These are times are when the daily patterns of your life are changing, like starting a new job, getting married, having a baby, relocating, or even a change of seasons. During these transitions, you’re settling into new a new lifestyle, a new schedule or new responsibilities. You have to sieze the opportunity to be intentional about shaping the result.
When something enters to disrupt the regular routine of life, you slowly make adjustments. Small choices that become the new routine. New habits. It could be a small pressure that now makes an old habit harder to maintain, a new block of free time you need to fill, or a new responsibility.
One of the significant transitions I face every year is the in fall. This is a time in the midwest US when the weather turns colder and the daylight hours narrow. My favorite time to run is in the early morning as the sun is rising, the birds are chirping and most of my family is still sleeping and won’t miss me when I slip out. For years, I would just stop working out when it became dark and cold in the mornings. Over the course of a month or two, I would fall into the habit of sleeping a little later and exercising a little less until I had completely given it up until spring.
Two years ago, it all changed. I realized I was just letting the transition wash over me. I was letting good habits slowly fade away while the bad ones crept in. I decided to take back control of my habits and be intentional during the transition. It wasn’t easy. It required focus, discipline and persistence. I first had to admit that I am too much of a fair weather runner to fool myself into thinking I could maintain my old habit through the transition of seasons. So I came up with a plan I knew would test me, but I thought I could handle.
I started working out over my lunch hour at the gym. At first, I told myself it was an experiment that I would try for one month. During October, I set a schedule that I thought would work. I blocked my calendar at work and tenaciously protected the time from meetings, walk-bys or “urgent” emails calling out to me. I kept a close watch on the things that were threats to keeping up the habit beyond the experiment period. Things like little excuses that crept into my mind or small logistics that I could control. For example, I like to change out of and back into my work clothes quickly and comfortably, so I took to wear loose-fitting, more comfortable and casual clothes on my work-out days. This may seem like a very small thing, but it was an important adjustment for me, and one that had the benefit of forcing the “will I work out today or not?” decision to early in the day versus the last minute.
Focusing on an exercise habit is a good example of being intentional and in control during transitions, but I’ve successfully applied this to many other habits as well. Every year I go back and forth between driving to work and taking the bus based on my kids’ school year. Giving up the freedom of a car is not easy, but worth it.
I recently managed to go back to my habit of healthy eating after a binge on entertainment food during a long vacation. I almost carried my food-as-entertainment habit back into regular life, but after seeing what was happening for a week, I refocused on my transition back from vacation and nipped the bad habit.
My family has another big transition coming soon as the kids finish school and begin summer vacation. You can bet we will be watching what kind of habits our kids adopt in the first weeks of summer!
Letting your feelings, your negative tendencies and your environment steal control over your future as life transitions wash over you is not a smart way to live. Having the self awareness to see when you are in transition and manage your time and habits accordingly is a profound way to take back your freedom and own your agenda.
Here are two things to think about right now to make this idea real in your life:
- Think of a time when you had a good habit going that has fallen away. What took it’s place? Reflect on how you lost the habit. What was going on in your life at the time? Was there anything new that disrupted your daily pattern? Be a student of your past and of your own responses to life’s situations. Learn and adapt.
- Pick one habit that you’d like to adopt now. Are you coming up on any life transitions – major or minor – that open the door to inserting the habit? Think of the things that will get in the way of sustaining the habit, adjust to them if you can, but at least be aware and face them head on.
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