How to Build Habits143This is why you can accomplish so much more at once
as an adult than you could as a child. You can walk and talk
and be aware of your surroundings. You can read quickly and
write easily. Habits are wonderful and powerful tools.
But habits aren’t just passive by- products of repetition.
We can purposefully develop and form habits of our choosing
as well. This is how athletes become so highly skilled. They
use their conscious brains to learn a skill, turn the skill into
a habit, send it to their subconscious brains, and then free up
space to learn another new skill.
Habits are the building blocks of excellence.
Set Your Habit- Building Anchor
Habits are stepping- stones to get you to a destination. You can
build them, add to them, and use them over and over again to
get where you want to go.
Last spring my family went for a hike only to find that the
recent rains made for a very messy adventure. We came to a
particularly muddy spot in the river, and one by one my family
members tried to jump across— and invariably landed in the
sticky mud. Not wanting to have to clean my shoes, I took a
large rock from the river and put it down in the mud. Then I
got another large rock and stood on the first stone and put the
second one farther along in the mud.
It took longer and required a little extra effort, but my
shoes stayed dry; and on the way back, everyone in my family
avoided the mud by walking on the rocks I’d placed.
Building habits in our lives is like placing those rocks in