One of the necessities of our human existence is a personal infrastructure. What this is referring to is your individual assets, tools and learning that have solidified your capabilities, resources and problem solving tools.
When I sit down with someone for one-on-one, individually tailored coaching, the most powerful concept we go over is how to make sure you are mindful and in control of your infrastructure. Each thought that you have and act upon is the result of a belief or set of beliefs that you have; these mental systems and files have been created since we were born and probably became pretty solid in our mental programming by our 12th birthday.
If you are someone who is ready for real, positive change and grwoth in your life–meaning you have a desire to make modifications to the triggers in your DNA and hardwiring that are not serving you well–simply “not doing that thing” anymore is not a sufficient plan! To successfully break a habit, you must also make a habit.
Further exploration of personal infrastructure
I’ll begin by telling you a story that dates back to a period of my life which I consider to be my lowest. Pausing for a minute here, let me just say that the term low is not something I see as a negative but rather it is a word that evokes hope; the hope of climbing upward to something higher. My lowest point I’ve ever had is something I’m very grateful for because this sparked a powerful mental awakening, a new way of life, an international business venture, and doing the thing I love to do; all of that started at said low.
In my therapy program at the time I was working on some serious and intense issues; discussing my parents, processing childhood sexual trauma and abuse, discussing my experience through my adoption. However, in the mean time I was also researching and learning everything I could about mindfulness, habit formation, and also the science of success.
Can you guess the biggest and most prevalent message I kept learning throughout all of this research? Through everything I studied, it always came back to the fact that the number one factor that unites all successful people is the mindset that to break a habit you have to make a habit. At this point, I had sudden epiphany that in the whole of my past three decades of life, I had not dedicated any of my energy to forming new and improved habits. This led me to focus my thoughts on analyzing my current life and I asked myself:
When was my life ever going well?
When in my life did I successfully manage my triggers?
At which points in my life did I act out or not act out?
I want to emphasize here that I was not spending precious energy simply telling myself to not do the thing! Again, to break oneself of a habit, one must make oneself a new habit. Obsessively trying to not to do the thing you are triggered or tempted to do is just going to lead to doing more of ‘the thing’ because that’s the area to which all of your focus and thoughts are being directed!
What I found out was very interesting.
When I was doing well:
A) I had goals
B) I had good sleep patterns
C) I practiced good, balanced nutrition
D) I stayed hydrated
E) I exercised
F) I practiced the art of mindfulness
How illuminating it was to realize that all of these were new and better habits I had created for myself. Building these positive, action-based habits was my beginning process of fortifying my own personal infrastructure.
Back to my therapy program; there was no clear structure, and there were no goals set nor did I focus on any productive objectives. However, aside from my therapy I still found myself in the role of project manager. In my professional life I was all about success, workflow, process improvement and execution, infrastructure and measuring progress outcomes. This strategy was important to success in my career; so why was I not employing any structure to help myself as a human?
