Create the incentives and your behavior will follow suit.
I remember so many times that I tried to avoid drinking with a lot of effort — proposing a distance transformed into time. I set the space in my mind to stop drinking for at least a month. And how well I look through the process! The change was radical, and that was my incentive to keep moving forward one day at a time.
I cleaned and shaved — in the shelter — among many other homeless people. However, that raised my self-esteem even more since I indirectly compared the progress of my process with seeing others. That was already a great incentive that I had unconsciously created every morning after bathing.
Note how this may apply to building other good habits.
I put on my best clothes — which, of course, it was all donations. I would put on my headphones to avoid hearing negative conversations, and I would walk out the shelter door with high esteem. Ready to conquer the world and the destructive addictions that controlled my life.
In that kind of situation, things were a bit more complicated. Anyway, I had created that situation for myself by wildly derailing from life. After so much alcoholism, I needed to stay sober for at least fifteen days to control my nerves and look for a job that would lead me to make some cash and rent a room, which would get me out of the shelter — homelessness.
Eureka! I had everything figured out.
But when it comes to forming habits that will help you change destructive behaviors? It is easier said than done.
The only obvious incentive I wore around my neck was that I looked good and presentable, and my health was also on the rise. But inside my being, an invisible battle was taking place — the one I was holding against my mind. I looked like a car that lacked alignment because I was deviating involuntarily.
When I involuntarily strayed and put myself in danger of relapse — the incentive straightened my path.
Later, I realized I was relying too much on my willpower, which was dangerous because it is limited in critical moments. That internal force runs out, and confusion and chaos inevitably enter the mind. At the end of the crucial stage, I gave mental explanations of how I already had enough control over having a drink. I contemplated the wrong idea.
At the most critical stage, we must pay attention to how the environment triggers our emotions and influences our thoughts. The mind is a biological search computer. Finds and analyzes any clues that trigger signals to spark behaviors (habits) “for our benefit or against us.”
I realized without resentment that each fall strengthened the path to the goal — paving self-control in my everyday battle.
If the first time I sobered up for a month and fell? I propose to advance the next time a month and a day more, so the effort didn’t seem so pronounced and unreachable. These experiences are the key to creating new habits too, don’t be disappointed if they don’t work the first or the fiftieth time.
Each fall is one more experience to apply what you learned the last time to get back up. And each time, you will get up higher, and you will gain more ground. Treat the new ground as a treasure full of experiences applicable to future falls and reinforce new habits.
Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest. The effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them.-James Clear
If you have had an unpleasant experience in life and you overcame it, share it and see how you can contribute to helping someone else. It’s the best feeling in life.
Learning from life experiences, sharing them, and passing wisdom from one generation to the next is how humanity has gotten to where we are today.
I learned the hard way, but I hope you get better every day at building good habits by “creating incentives.”
Be creative!
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