'Tis the season to renew better habits. Maybe you started at the new year, setting resolutions, and working toward a better year than last, but for myself, it is always Lent. I feel much less frustrated this lenten season than I have in years past, perhaps if only for the reason that I know so much more about changing habits. You see, we tend to track our progress by marking a day as "win or lose." Today I failed, but yesterday I succeeded. We try to quit yelling, quit complaining, remember that task right away.... and at the end of the day we failed again. Or was it really failure? Somewhere in my readings, someone pointed out that changing our habits goes through very slow stages. And never-mind that popular book title, it can take far more than thirty days. The first stage is just recognizing what change needs to be made. That alone can be difficult. Perhaps someone pointed out a flaw in your life, and you don't believe it. Surely, there is nothing wrong with your diet, or the way you treat your kids, or the chatter you make about other's lives. Perhaps you know something needs to change, but you just don't care yet. Perhaps you know what is wrong, but you haven't figured out what to do yet. So congratulate yourself on that first step, which is just identifying *what* to do. The next step is painful. For it is where most of us sit for a long while, not seeing any progress and believing we are hopeless. This the step of realizing that you just did the thing you don't want to do, again. You just yelled at the kids, again. After you decided to stop yelling. After you read a great book, joined a support team, and built yourself up, you fell into the same routine, again. And you see it. Sometimes not even till the end of the day, You see yourself falling into the same pattern right after it happens. But recognize this is progress! Before starting this journey, you hardly noticed.
Another step, but still painful, is the stage where you recognize yourself falling as you do it. You see yourself yelling and don't want to, but you're already in the act of doing it, and all those plans for how to respond instead come into your head too late. Sometimes this phase is even more painful, because you recognize the action in the middle of it, but you're not strong enough yet to stop it all the time. Then you start to notice right before you fall into the same habit. Right before. You don't succeed very often (if at all) in actually stopping yourself, or in choosing the new habit, but you do think of it before hand. Again, this still feels like failure. You're still doing the same thing! But notice this small step too. Finally, some success! The next stage is when you actually start to remember, to succeed once in a while. You actually take that deep breath and use the gentle tone. You catch yourself. You remember that task. But not very often. Most days you still mess it up. Often you feel stuck in the earlier stages. You chastise yourself still. Yet you are beginning to really change. And gradually, over a much longer time than you anticipated, the real change happens. You notice the failures so much more than your successes; it can feel like nothing is really happening. Then one day you catch sight of something that triggers a memory: a time when you fell into the same bad habit over and over. And you realize that is now a memory. Most often you now enact this new habit. You finally feel a certain sense of pride. This transition can take months, even years. And children go through it too. For my children, this means I may have to remind them about a mundane task over and over and over. "How many times do I have to tell you?" Once in a while the child remembers. You catch those moments and look on in shock, full expecting it to be a rarity. But have hope. It doesn't stay a rarity, especially if they continue to receive that gentle encouragement. It is slow. Yet it happens. If you look back over your life, you may notice this phenomenon has happened with many things. It took a long time to help my children learn their morning routine, and there was a ton of frustration as I felt like the burden to remember fell entirely on me. Yet now it is normal. I don't have to go through the whole list as much. It's part of life. It took me a long time to make time for reading, but I did. It took a while to make it a habit of noting my purchases right away, but I did. I have conquered many things. And I can keep working at new ones. Give yourself grace. Give your children grace. You're not failing if you keep going on the journey.
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March 2017
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