Saying you're going to change something in the New Year is easy. Doing it, of course, is the hard part, regardless of how committed you think you are. The lesson I always turn to about how people successfully break bad habits is one from NPR's Alix Spiegel. Last year around this time, she explored how disrupting your environment can help you turn the corner on a hangup. Research indicates that it's not so much the behavior that's hard to change, but the environment that gives us cues to perform that behavior. This insight started, strangely, with a study into why Vietnam veterans who were addicted to heroin during the war had such success overcoming their addictions after treatment and returning to the U.S. In large part, the fact that they weren't in Vietnam anymore helped their recovery tremendously.
"We think of ourselves as controlling our behavior, willing our actions into being, but it's not that simple," Spiegel writes. "It's as if over time, we leave parts of ourselves all around us, which in turn, come to shape who we are." And who we want to be.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Morning Advantage: Stick to Your Resolutions by Disrupting Your Environment - Gretchen Gavett - Harvard Business Review
