In my experience, though it is unlikely the best way to develop good habits and make changes in your life is, I often have a tendency to decide I want something to be different and then “just do it.”  That leaves a lot of openness though, which diffuses your resolve to make the change. Even when the decision to try something is a bit sudden, how you go about that can be structured in such a way that the doing becomes more amenable and the achievement of your goal more attainable.

Key Elements to Habit Change

In my opinion, the two most important elements to changing your habits and make changes in your life are:

1. Committed Desire – You have to actually WANT to change. No one else is going to do this for you.
2. Emotional Support – Support, be it from a single individual or an entire network of people, amplifies both the quality of your growth experience as well as the probability of achieving your goal.

Today I’m just going to focus on the Committed Desire side. The Emotional Support will be discussed in depth in the Relationships area of Cielem’el, and is a fundamental element of every time-constrained personal growth trial I conduct.

Breaking it Down

My first personal growth trial took about nine or ten years to implement completely (see The Impetus of My Conscious Personal Growth Journey). Although I can’t really say I have achieved complete “completion.” But I’ll get to that in a minute. The reason it took so long is because it had to be broken down into very small segments (which can be a very helpful survival technique as well) and through these small segments evolved a more significant goal as time went on. But seriously, I’ve been working on this aspect of myself for more than ten years now, and I still have work to do. Especially when I’m frustrated with my day job (though this happens less and less frequently now, after Two Weeks at the Grand Canyon). Twice just recently I’ve been talking with Dad about something and caught myself saying something and immediately stopping myself “No, I can’t say that! It’s against the nature of what I’m trying to be!” I think Dad finds all my personal growth stuff a bit amusing, but I also think he’s more interested in it than he lets on.

Slipping Up, and Segmenting Even Smaller Steps

There was also one time, one time that I failed in my concerted effort to not only bring people down with bad energy while I was in cancer treatment and to be kind to everyone no matter how awful I felt. When reviewing my journal in collating my thoughts on this subject, I did come across one point where I failed miserably in the latter years of the “constant kindness” goal, and even more unfortunately, it was during the multiple-month trial I had given myself of going through cancer treatment with grace, which to me was primarily remaining kind to all but also being empathetic and supportive of others.

That trial became the hardest in my life, not just because the physical treatment was such a physical and emotional burden, but also because I had made a fundamental mistake in deciding where to do my treatment. I had chosen to stay in Sacramento with my “boyfriend” (he was really just my pro partner for Argentine; the “relationship” didn’t start until I was diagnosed and knew I would need someone very close to me in order to get through it). The decision to stay with him ended up making my personal growth goal harder than I could have possibly conceived at the time of making the decision. I knew it was a risky decision, but I didn’t know it was going to be so utterly wrong for my sense of self and having any faith in myself.

Unfortunately the guy I stayed with during chemo and radiation treatment in Sacramento turned out to be worse than anything imaginable, worse than going through treatment completely alone, and I don’t completely know how I survived that period in my life. I kept the nastiness out of the Cielem’el cancer Journal because if people knew what it was really like, I can list at least six or eight people who would have physically flown out there to put this guy in his place and get me out of there, but I tried to cover up a lot of the emotional chaos so my family and friends wouldn’t become frantic with worry. Anyway, the unimaginable difficulty of my “kindness” goal was not just because of the hell that cancer treatment is (though treatment was, honestly, truly, a living hell), but even more so because the guy I stayed with turned out to be such an awful person, selfish, and mean. Which in and of itself is terrible to be around. Over time, he actually made me feel bad about myself as a person, for getting cancer in the first place even (like I was intentionally out there doing things trying to get cancer), and he was influencing me in terrible ways just because of being around him and his negativity all the time. It was gradually worse and worse, especially as time wore on and he resented the fact that I was “a burden” (even though he wouldn’t do anything to help me at all as time went on, I was completely taking care of myself the last three months of cancer treatment). So not only was I going through physical decline and the increasing neuropathy pain the peaked and the fiery pain stayed unbearable after the last chemo treatment, but I was also in this house where the emotional energy in his space and directed at me became darker and uglier by just a little bit every single day.

Thinking back, it’s interesting that I don’t think of it as becoming black around him though, or quite like the dark grayish “smog” over the crowd of angry people in Denver that made me want to take clear and significant action to become a better person. His aura (wow, am I actually going to make a statement suggesting I sometimes see auras? I guess I am, but don’t think for an instant that it’s something that is an actual skill for me, it’s just random) . . . his aura was kind of yellow when I first moved into his house. I know practically nothing about the meanings of different auric colors, all my knowledge is experiential only (based on what I have actually experienced and felt myself) but I do have a friend who’s really into it, and he used to do “color therapy,” which sounds really interesting. I’m going to have to do some research and write a piece on that soon, I think.

As time went on in the cancer house, what was initially a fairly comfortable shade of yellow around him got mixed with this ugly green smog that started out almost like those little slicing clouds that cut across the sky n the Midwest. The ugly green gradually merged with the yellow, making a murky dark yellowishly green color, truly nasty to go any closer to than absolutely necessary, like radioactive sewage. The lowest point in my personal development efforts of the past ten years was when I heard myself reactively say something spitefully mean back to him, just once, when he was throwing a lot of emotional crap and practically yelling at me for ruining his life, and even though that was his behavior and someone could pretty easily say he deserved it, I still hated myself for it because I spent soooooo many years trying to be a good person trying not to generate any pain or negativity in the world.

When I realized that this negative person was actually influencing my thoughts and behavior in completely the wrong way, I was already trapped, in chemo. I was so sick I couldn’t even ride in a car, and the neuropathy was so bad I couldn’t walk because of the burning stabbing pain each footstep entailed. There was a time towards the end where I was constantly telling myself: “Just get through the next minute. Just sixty seconds, then you can deal with the next minute. Just survive, that’s all you have to do, just survive. Ignore him, breathe, survive.”

That way of breaking down something difficult into steps or segments has always worked for me, and I believe it is a key element to how I have survived traumatic loss as well as troublesome family issues and business stress, and, especially, life-threatening illness.

An Effective Approach to Habit Changes and Growth – Personal Trials

Every time I set a personal growth goal for myself, I simply tried to implement the change immediately and “just do it.” I didn’t know how long it was going to take, and I didn’t plan any specific timeline for achieving any given habit change.

If you read a lot of self-help books like I have, you know that everyone claims their way is the best way when it comes to investing time trying to change a bad habit.  The thing is, they’re all wrong, and they’re all right. They’re all right in that the only way to change a bad habit is to actually try to do something to change it or lessen it until you have the behavior you want. But they’re all wrong in the timelines they propose. Or are they? If everyone suggests someone different, then how do you know who is right?

How Much Time Should a Personal Trial Take?

I’ve been consciously trying to change myself for ten years (before that were years and years of simply trying to understand who or what I was). I say I was consciously trying to change in the last ten years because I definitely knew what I was trying to change about myself, and I put conscious effort into changing it. What I’ve never really known was how long the change would take to “take.”

In my experience, some things have taken years and years of continuous “baby steps” to make recognizable progress. Other things I’ve turned around on a dime, some in less than a week, some a month or many months.

In the past, I never set a “timeframe” to a habit change, I would just basically try to make the change and if I just couldn’t do it, I would break it down to a smaller segment or improvement, essentially lengthening the overall duration to complete change but always making some kind of small progress

I honestly can’t tell you exactly who says what, though I can generally tell you the most recent person/author that put that number on my list of different times for implementing different new habits. These are the timeframes, from shortest to longest, that I’ve noticed most from other self-help writers as the amount of time you must focus effort on a change in order for it to “take” and become a habit in your life going forward:

3-day trials – Kevin Ford

He isn’t really a self-help guru prolifically published and all that, rather he’s a kind of life coach. You can read about my first three-day trial experiences in The Raw Diet 3-Day Trial.

12-day trials – Caroline Myss

She’s a medical intuitive whose work became the foundation of my beliefs in some fundamental spiritual concepts about spirit guides and the soul. She’s big on the significance of the number twelve throughout astrologic concepts, and the number 40 in historical spiritual references such as in the life of Jesus, or the teachings of Buddha.

30-day trials – Steve Pavlina

He is the king of the thirty day trial in my opinion, and he’s documented numerous interesting and successful 30-day personal growth trials in his blog at www.stevepavlina.com. My first focused 30-day trial was changing to a vegetarian diet, on which you’ll see numerous posts from me over the course of the month of November (in 2010), or you can skip to the Conclusion of the 30-Day Vegetarian Trial on November 30, 2010.

40-day trials – Vimala Rodgers

She’s really well-published in how changing your handwriting can change your life. My first 40-day trial is in handwriting changes, so I will be writing more about that in December 2010.

6-week trials – Kelly Howell

She’s developed a ton of guided meditations and subliminal mind suggestions, and she always says it takes about six weeks for a new habit to become implanted in your mind. I’ll be writing soon about my first 6-week trial using Kelly’s methods.

I have a tendency to do multiple concurrent trials to make several changes in my habits at the same time, and, as you know, I also end to get into what are essentially continuous cumulative trials. There’s more to come on specific timeframes for me in those kind of trials, in addition to future documentation of each new trial I try in advancing my personal and spiritual development.

My personal belief is that different length trials are appropriate for different kinds of goals. Three days was all I could handle for the raw diet trial, and I wouldn’t have done Day 3 in that one if I hadn’t committed to it specifically and openly, posting to a large group of friends that I was doing a three-day raw trial. My first Kelly Howell six-week trial, on the other hand, was more about trying a specific kind of meditation and then potentially trying other meditations.

he thing is, how much time you need to commit to a trial can be variable to the complexity of the habit you are trying to change, or how deeply you feel you need to experience the new “you” before you can be sure about whether or not the change is indeed a good fit for you. For example, I didn’t do just a six-week trial with Kelly Howell’s meditation; I actually gave myself two months on it.

The Beauty of Deadlines

The cool thing about these kinds of personal growth trials is the fact that there’s a defined end point for the focused trial. First, there’s a free will element that makes it easier to try any given habit change, because at the end of the thirty days or three days or whatever, you have the option of dropping that habit because it didn’t work for you. Steve Pavlina is big on this.

In my professional life (and academic, and well, everything), I have always recognized two great things that would motivate me to making the deadline. First, you have a point of reference for working backward to what has to occur when in order to meet the deadline. And, even more importantly to me in professional commitments, having a deadline means that no matter how hard you work or how hard it is, when the deadline comes, the project is over, it’s done. The next day, you can forget about it completely and take a break or start on something new.

You Must Complete the Trial!

In the end, with time-constrained personal trials, you can make a decision at any point that you are going to commit to this habit change as something you will keep with you permanently on your life’s journey. And you can decide you’re not going to keep doing it after your thirty days or six weeks or whatever.

Even if you don’t like it while you’re doing it, even if what you’re trying actually scares you with its side effects and experiences you didn’t expect or prepare for, unless it’s physically harmful to you, you still have to complete the trial. You MUST complete the trial in order to know with certainty how you feel about continuing or discontinuing the practice. Often the deadline will come and go without pomp and circumstance because it has simply become a part of your daily life.

Completing what you commit to also gives you an enormous sense of accomplishment, as well as confidence in yourself and your ability to succeed. I highly recommend you try various time-constrained personal trials. I have committed myself to making time-constrained personal growth trials an ongoing part of my personal growth, so you will learn a lot about my experiences in many different personal growth trials in the months (and years) to come.