Habits seem so repetitive and the same. Boring with nothing new and gratifying. We, creatures of habit, is this our lot in life? ….. For many, it is and the only solution is to escape. …. But what if you had a habit of being disgruntled with life. That’s right, you were bored with life, disgruntled and habitually had the thought, life should be better than this. So you complained and you accidentally found, in this complaining, some excitement and newness. This can happen to kids as they seem to have more chance of accidenting up a good thing. This will then be rewarding and the child will be a grump their whole life (hoping or trained this is the way to get good stuff).
Others get excited as a kid about stuff. It’s rewarding. They end up trained, thinking being excited, is going to get them rewards. Now we have a happy person (pollyanna) living a boring life.
Both of these types of people have drives to start. But they don’t have the make it happen habit machine, It doesn’t work. All we have is positive thinkers and negative thinkers, but neither is capable of making it happen. They don’t have the habit machinery to do it. Got it? Positive people doing nothing, pretending they aren’t frustrated and negative people doing nothing and being extra frustrated. That’s just what we do.
We, creatures of habits, are like machines. Machines just do what they do, and only what they do. Now, the machine does have a range of production and you can force it to the max for a while, before it breaks or needs repair. But, it does what it does and that’s it. A hot dog machine makes hot dogs. A popcorn machine makes popcorn. You can’t force a hotdog machine to make popcorn, computers, chairs, or anything else, except hotdogs, pretty simple.
We creatures of habit want a new result and get grumpy or excited about having it then realize we are stuck, fixed, labeled as a ……… hot dog machine wanting steak. The only way to take advantage of this grumpy or positive energy is to use it to build a new machine. That’s right, the only way to get a new result is to build a new machine: want new result, must build new machine.
The challenge is we have never been trained or taught how to build a new machine. It’s not that we can’t, we can. Yet, it takes time and re-building of our machine. But not only don’t we have a build a new machine equipment, we are so against change or building a new machine as our family, society, schools, friends, everybody wants to change us or build us into some new machine they want. We don’t like this and we have built the most amazing machinery to not allow new machine building to happen. We are tired of everybody pushing us around telling us what to do and who to be. We have so many “dig in your heals”, you’re not going to make me change machinery it is ridiculous. Why should I be the one to change, change them.
Now we are stuck. We now want to change ourselves and we almost don’t have a chance! We have set ourselves up to be stuck ……. yet, we can change. We just haven’t been trained and we have all sorts of machinery that we built to stop any change. That’s just the situation and we have to deal with it.
Hey, what if parents and schools, didn’t force us to change. Instead of them trying to change us, what if they gave us the responsibility to change or grow ourselves. Now, I’ve been told, you can’t give responsibility to someone, they have to take it. May be, that’s what parents and teachers job is: to set it up so we want to take responsibility and they help us train ourselves to do that. We would educate and train ourselves. We would give ourselves homework, training and practice. I mean education and how to do things is so readily available. Its online, in books, classes, seminars and there are so many gyms and competitions for us to develop our real world abilities. We could readily build the machine we need to get to where we want to go. Once we got there, we could build our machine to go someplace new. We would be capable creatures of habit. We could train our hot dog machine to make popcorn, steak or anything else we wanted.
It starts with responsibility, then building, getting and training the tools to grow our creature of habit or build our habit machine to whatever we wanted. Then grumpy and positive wouldn’t be such sad creatures. Becoming responsible, building our capable machinery could be trained by parents and in school. Parents and teachers seem to see students as helpless and incapable of growth, stuck creatures. They spoon feed them and give up way too quickly because this student is only a “C” student and that’s all they can do. Parents and teachers need to start looking for and catching their student’s slightest growth and being responsible for their own growth. How did you get that to happen? How did you figure that out? WOW, that’s better than yesterday! What are you going to do to learn the next thing? What is the next thing? You are really taking charge of your development in math, …… or ….. (specific, really caught and seen).
Parents and teachers are trained and taught to decide and force the learning on the student. They are trained to try only so long, then give up. They are trained to take the responsibility, then blame the kids (not set it up so they can take responsibility). They are trained that students are somewhat limited and fixed and can’t really help themselves. They are helpless and incapable and the students do the best they can to prove the teacher right.
When I was thrown out into the real world, there were so many places I could have been responsible or taken responsibility, but I didn't. I just did my job, as that is what I was trained to do. I could have taken responsibility and actually done an amazing job, but I didn’t. I saw and felt how I was trained and felt I could do it myself and did a little, but I was defective with some very basic machinery. One of the biggest was responsibility. Since, we weren’t ever trained to take responsibility, we don’t know what to do or a machined trained to be responsible. After all, it’s not my job. I’m not getting paid for it. We have been well trained to let someone else be responsible.
Our parents and teachers really do have the best intentions of helping us, but they’ve never been trained to set it up so their children take the responsibility from them and train and grow themselves to do the job. There you go, train students to be responsible and capable, is the job of parents and schools. Teaching and education, might fit in there somewhere too, but it’s not what you know but what you responsible and capably do with the education. There you go: responsible and capable, that’s the goal of parents and schools.
We creatures of habit are such stuck in the mud, boring, fixed, helpless creature, if we don’t train and develop the responsible and capable habit machinery. Our gumpy and pollyanna selves will be able to do something only if we responsibly develop ourselves. When you get dissatisfied or excited you will have the machinery to support yourself. Creatures of habit, grumpy or pollyanna, are far from boring is they have responsible and capable machinery to make something amazing happen.
One of the challenges is students, children or any creature of habit, often think control and responsibility are conscious “things”. They are not. Control and responsibility are habit machinery that has to be built. We often expect someone to “be” responsible, when they don’t have the machinery to do it. We are back to hot dog machines and popcorn machines. We have to have the machine to do it. To know how and even know when to do something, doesn’t mean you can and will do it. Fat people know all the thin things to do do and when to do them and they literally can’t. They don’t have the machinery to do it. A person may know how to make money, know how to save and invest, even know when and where, but just can’t seem to pull it off. It’s all about being capable of building the machine that productively utilizes the information or education. Being responsible to take the education, information and being capable of building a machine to do the job. The responsibility is at the machine building level, which will take the assistance of conscious effort, but responsibility happens when the person has the machine to be responsible. He can’t force his hot dog machine with his conscious control to make popcorn. But he can build a popcorn machine.
What would a kid do if he was responsible for: …... (specific thing) ….. Make a list of all the little things. Get really insignificant. Know your job is to catch the student, child, being responsible. But even better, teach the student to catch themselves. It’s not a conscious immediate control, so be patient. It’s not going to happen overnight. We already are seeing two things:
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The little things, insignificant things are the steps to getting the job done. It doesn’t happen in huge steps. It happens in small added up steps. We need a machine to make these little steps important and find a machine that holds on to them and puts them together in bigger productive steps.
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It doesn’t happen overnight. It takes patience. We need to build in intrinsic rewards in this transition or patience part to allow us to persist and maintain. Patience and persistence is a habit machine. Intrinsic rewards combined with a focus of the rewarding goal.
Grumpy and Pollyanna are creatures of habit without the machinery to bring the better life they see into existence. They have been trained not to be able to do that. They can’t get themselves to be responsible, to do it and even if they did, they aren’t capable of building the new machinery to produce the better life. In fact they think control is about working with their strengths, being the best their fixed and stuck self can be, and forcing their amazing popcorn machine to make hot dogs. They believe in instant or nothing. Fat is biological and takes some time, habit machinery is a little more complicated and they want it in 21 days or less (hey, we will go for 66 days, but not more) If I can’t go from 90 pound weakling to Superman in 66 days, …. It wasn’t meant to be!
Most likely you are the 90 pound weakling in whatever you want to do as you have probably never responsibly worked out and developed yourself. Now you want instant Superman! Remember, the two things above? Little wins and not overnight! Gumpy and Pollyanna, I’m sorry! You have been trained to fail, but you could turn it around. Deep breath, patience, and get training with a small goal: responsible and capable machines.
You might start developing your sales style or passion. Get excited (Pollyanna) or start rubbing the sore of a boring sad repetitive creature of habit suffering (Grumpy). A start is to get yourself motivated to do something! That something needs to be a patient, little step, building of your responsible and capable habit machine or training your responsible and capable creature of habit. Take the next step Grumpy, Pollyanna! Go for it! …. Slow down, patiently, steadily, slowly and persistently! It’s a training. Then anything is possible. For you Grumpy, it will not be boring. For you Pollyanna, who knows, but of course it will to be amazing!
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