Perseverance—Sustaining the Life You Want
Energy and persistence conquer all things.
—Benjamin Franklin
You have something really good going. You’re happy. You’re proud. You’re excited. But then, just like that, you can’t keep it up. Somehow the old patterns reappear, and you find yourself wondering how you were able to start down the golden path to begin with, and how you were able to stay on it, even just for a little while.
Developing good habits and keeping away from bad habits seems so simple on the surface. We have free will. If we want to do something (or stop doing something), we should just do it (or stop doing it). What’s preventing us? The answer is complex and multifaceted. There are many forces in our lives that drive us toward or away from certain behaviors. It’s important to recognize this fact and do everything we can to understand those forces and how they affect us. We also have to recognize our strengths and weaknesses that help or hinder our ability to overcome these forces to enable us to work effectively toward getting on, and staying on, the path we desire.
Persevering in the face of challenges
What we want is to continue on our desired path even in the face of challenges and barriers—what we need is perseverance. It’s a good word, a solid word, but what does it mean? From a practical perspective, we’re going to have compulsions, we’re going to have doubts, and we may have periods of failure—of sliding back into undesired habits and away from our desired path. It’s important that we accept these potentialities and incorporate them into our plan. It’s crucial that we don’t view them as the end of the path or as a failure we can’t recover from. We have to be intentional about our challenges and barriers and have a plan for how to deal with them when they arise. A common problem with habits is that people attach a magical quality to them. They feel they don’t understand them and that they really can’t be understood. Sometimes we’re able to follow them, and sometimes we’re not. But if we stop and reflect, if we intentionally assess what is happening—in our thoughts, emotions, and actions—we can remove the mystery from our habits. We can persevere and sustain the life we want to live.
Habits—the good, the bad, and the consistent
No matter how hard we try (or don’t try), our habits are a big part of our lives. We strive to follow good habits that give our lives meaning or make us happy. We try to rid ourselves of bad habits that may harm our health, are dangerous, or aren’t conducive to the lives we want. For each of these habits, we have to create the desired context in our minds. We have to create and strengthen the neural pathways that associate those habits with their desired outcomes or potential consequences. For example, we may dread the thought of exercise—we’d rather do anything else. Our established neural pathways associate those activities with the effort involved rather than their desired outcomes. Whether we know it or not, we’ve wired our brains to dislike those activities. The same is true for bad habits. Smoking, for example, is universally known as a bad habit. It causes cancer, it’s highly addictive, and it makes your breath stink. But smokers aren’t thinking about these things when they light up—they’re anticipating the release of adrenaline and the quickening of the heart. They’re giving in to the symptoms of their physical and psychological addiction.
For any activity to become a habit that we can follow consistently, we first have to rewire our brains. When we think of a habit, we have to intentionally associate it with the reason we want to have (or remove) that habit. We have to consistently see the habit for what it is in terms of our lives, not for the associated effects that we don’t want as part of our lives. When we think of exercise, we should think of the fun we’ll have with the activities (btw, our exercise should be fun) and how it will make us feel healthier and more energetic. When we think of quitting smoking, we should think of how we’re breathing more easily and how our skin looks healthier, not about how intensely we need another smoke. When we catch ourselves trying to rationalize a break from a desired habit, we have to look closely at what the little voice in our heads is saying and keep our eyes wide open to the implications. For example, it may be OK to skip a day of exercise if we’re feeling under the weather, but it’s absolutely not OK to have “just one cigarette” to be social after we’ve been able to quit for a month. We have to have a plan for our habits, make them realistic and achievable, and have the discipline to stick to them.
Keeping it going for the long haul
Perseverance requires you to both have high expectations for yourself and the ability to forgive yourself. It requires you to be brutally honest with yourself about the present while visualizing a specific lifestyle into the future. It means not just adopting a new fad to get your weight down or quit smoking: it means changing your lifestyle and fully committing to that lifestyle. But it’s important to remember that everyone’s discipline and energy ebbs and flows and that even with the very best of intentions and a full commitment to a specific lifestyle, we still may fall off the wagon periodically. Sustaining the life we want requires us to look at these times as slight deviations from the path instead of falling off of a cliff. We need to get right back on the path and recommit ourselves to the life we want. When our discipline or energy ebbs, we have to take time to reflect on the reasons we started down our desired path to begin with. Sustaining the life we want means reinforcing why we want that life.
Being who you want to be means committing yourself to that person and not accepting anyone else.
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Artwork: Kevin Carden
