Why are some people more successful with habit change?

My clients have been making some fantastic breakthroughs lately. Being coached requires a lot of self-awareness and taking deep dives into what makes you do the things you do. I am honored to work with people who are willing to do just that because it is no small feat.

My clients' successes got me thinking about why some people successfully create new habits and why others seem to struggle.

I breezed by a big part of it above. Changing requires self-awareness and understanding what makes you do what you do.

Most of us don't want to look at why we do what we do. It's hard to put a mirror up to our faces and see who we are. Not only is it hard, it is often painful. It's much easier to act like we are too busy to see that who we are is not always who we want to be.

You know I like to give examples from my life, so here ya go! I've always known my purpose in life is to live a life in service of others. Maybe it's the fact that I am a highly sensitive person, but I have always wanted to help people break out of their cycles of suffering.

Early on in my path, I thought that being of service meant I needed to give all of myself to everyone and anyone who asked. I said yes to everything that was asked of me. Of course, this is totally unsustainable and only leads to burnout, and that is exactly what happened. While I was busy saying yes to everyone and everything else, I was saying no to myself and my needs. I ended up feeling resentful and angry as people asked for more and more from me.

The problem wasn't them, well a few people were a problem, it was me. I thought that being of service meant I had to be available for people in any way they needed. I didn't know that setting boundaries so I could protect my energy and peace would allow me to do more for others. I learned that people-pleasing was not a healthy trait and if I wanted to continue to live a life of service I was going to have to meet my people-pleasing tendencies head-on.

If you are a people pleaser you know this is not an easy task. It requires looking back at your life, into your childhood, to discover what happened that started this pattern. This was a painful process for me and one I see people trying to avoid at all costs. Until you are willing to see your patterns and understand why they developed, change is a hard-fought process.

Another factor that helps people be successful in creating habits is resilience. Resilience is not something we all have, although some people seem to be more resilient than others. It is a skill that can be taught and nurtured.

Resilience gives us the ability to face and adapt to challenges so we can overcome them. To develop this skill further, you have to continue to put yourself into situations that challenge you, fail, learn, adapt, and try again. You don't let setbacks stop you but instead, see what went wrong and choose to attempt again with a different approach.

Once again, this is a hard process. It requires you to face failure head-on when most of us just like to walk away once we've failed and forget it ever happened. This requires a mindset shift. Instead of seeing failure as a lack of success, you have to see failure as a lesson in what doesn't work. This gives you the information you need to figure out what does work and how to move forward successfully. This helps you push your limits and never settle.

And the third thing I think is key to creating new habits is a little bit of grit or stubbornness. While people often attribute stubbornness as a negative trait, I find that it can be extremely helpful when it comes to habit formation. It can help you get back up after a failure to try again.

As I've already mentioned, change requires you to step outside of your comfort zone into what is unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and challenging. It requires you to make friends with failure so you can pick yourself up and try again and again and again until you find what helps you be successful.

This is where grit and stubbornness come into play. If you, like me, are stubborn enough to not let failure get the best of you then that tenaciousness will help you when things get challenging. You won't give up. It's not an option.

Grit and stubbornness can help you look at things as a challenge instead of an obstacle. Who doesn't love a good challenge? It gets your brain working in a way where it sees this issue as something to be solved. You get to play detective! It can also help you look at things from all angles when you don't find a solution right away.

Even if you aren't a naturally stubborn person, you can develop qualities that help you approach your problems with the same tenaciousness. You can learn to not give up at the first sign of failure. I know this because I've watched this happen with my clients. They've learned how to stick with habits they want to have in their lives even when they don't work out on the first try. They've learned how to see what's not working, learn from it, and come up with a new plan.

This is something you can learn. Don't let another month or year go by wishing things were different. Do something different today!