How to choose our destiny
By Ernie Mitchell HTF Columnist
Be it in our business, careers or personal lives, the habits we choose to live by dictate our success or failure. Never is the impact of adopting positive habit patterns more evident than in young recruits graduating from military basic training.
When I joined the Air Force back in 1965 I was about as dumb, misguided and undisciplined as any young kid has ever been. I say this because I had no practical experience, little discipline and no horizons. When we got on the airplane headed to basic training I thought I knew everything. I soon learned that I didn’t even expect anything let alone know everything.
The minute the airplane landed in San Antonio Texas our world changed. There were no Mommies or Daddies to make excuses or cut slack for us. We may have taken our first “baby-steps” under the loving eyes of our mothers but that night we took our first “grownup steps” under the demanding eyes of our new drill sergeants. The good old days of being young-and-dumb, unconscious incompetents, were quickly coming to an end as the drill sergeants commenced yelling at us and systematically canceling our freedoms. Robert Filgham wrote: “Everything I Ever Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.” I submit that military boot camp is kindergarten for grown-ups!
The purpose of military boot camp is to capture you in a controlled highly focused environment, take away all your freedoms, break you down and then rebuild you back to the standards of the military. It is successful because it is highly focused. There is no time for distractions. The military knows that we are creatures of habit and the seeds of a habit, once planted and reinforced with repeated spaced repetition become an integral part of our guidance system. As demanding and uncomfortable as military basic training is at the time, it is the best training a young person can ever hope to receive. I say this because when they start the rebuilding process they put you back together with positive habit patterns that carry you through the rest of your life.
Upon completion of boot camp graduates still lack technical training for their assigned career field but they are no longer “unconscious incompetents.” They understand the rules of accountability. They know how to roll out of bed in the morning and get the job done. Upon graduation from “Basic” they are then ready for the advanced technical training the military and the world has to offer. Welcome to chapter-one, page-one on becoming a “Conscious Competent.”
So, why are habits so powerful and if we are indeed creatures of and slaves to the habits that control our destiny how, short of running off and joining the military, can we purposely and proactively acquire positive habit patterns that will deliver us to our dreams? To answer this, we must understand what habits are and how they work.
The habits we form reflect the mental paths our previous actions have taken. Through repetition they become well traveled, familiar roads that lead us to our ultimate destination. In the beginning the lightly traveled paths of a new habit are unfamiliar, thinly defined, un-clearly marked and therefore easy to stray from. In time, as the paths are repeatedly traveled they become wider and deeper like confining deep canyons that constrain us to “their” destination. If it’s a bad habit, the destination is negative, if it’s a good habit the destination is positive. Regardless of whether it’s good or bad, every time a habit path is followed it becomes easier to travel.
Long term, whether we choose to form positive habit patterns or negative habit patterns has everything to do with whether the paths we travel will lead to our dreams or our destruction. In short, our habits control our destiny.
Since it isn’t practical to hire a platoon of drill sergeants to scare us out of our old bad habits and into new virtuous “success” habits we have to rely on other methods. Rule-one in ridding yourself of negative habits is to replace them with new positive habits.
Our ability to develop a desired success habit is dependent on being able to concentrate our mental powers on the desired outcome of the new habit until it can be vividly visualized in the mind’s eye of our imagination. Practicing these concentration and visualization exercises reinforces and strengthens the desired habit pattern until it eventually becomes an integral part of our habit induced guidance system.
Learn to choose the habits that guide us is the first step to choosing your destiny.
Ernie Mitchell, Moose Lake Hill, Orr, MN, © All
Rights Reserved 2010.
