Notes on reshaping your destiny, from Sandy Davis

From Sandy's latest newsletter:
Your destiny derives in large part from your habitual daily behaviors. At any given moment, you are effectively the sum of your daily habits. These are all the routine activities that you do repetitively, every day, for the most part with little or no conscious attention. Taken together, your daily habits have been moving you steadily in a certain direction for a long time. As long as you don’t change any of your daily habits, you will most likely keep going in precisely that direction. So if you want to know where you will end up (i.e., if you want a preview of your destiny), just look at where you are going now.

If you don’t like the direction you’re headed in and want to make a lasting change, the best (and possibly only) way to do this is to make a change in one or more of your daily habits.

This requires that you disrupt your normal way of behaving in order to substitute in a new behavior and to practice that new behavior repetitively over a long period of time. How long? Long enough for the new behavior to become as “wired-in” and invisible as the old one was. This takes at least months of continuous practice. Sometime it takes considerably longer.

Here’s the remarkable payoff: Even a small change in your daily practices has the power to change everything, including your destiny. Here’s the reality that most of us know intuitively and also somehow manage to disavow: The key to successful personal change is continuous daily practice.

The good news is that this reality has another side: When you are willing to practice just about any skill for at least 15 minutes each day, you can develop your mastery of that skill quickly and steadily––no matter how old you are when you start.

Call to Action: Identify one small behavior that you would like to turn into a future habit. Choose one that will make your life more enjoyable or more fulfilling in the long run. Then start practicing this behavior every day. For starters, set yourself a goal of practicing it for at least 90 consecutive days without a single miss.

Tip: If you want to know whether you are keeping your commitment to practice faithfully, you will need to keep a daily log of your practice times. Otherwise, you won’t know for sure in six weeks whether or not you practiced today. Let go of the responsibility of remembering such things. Just write them down and keep moving.

Relevant Quotes:

“If you want to know your future, look at what you are doing in this moment.” --Tibetan Saying

“Whatever you would make habitual, practice it; and if you would not make a thing habitual, do not practice it, but accustom yourself to something else.” -- Epictetus, 1st Century Greek Philosopher

“Be not afraid of growing slowly. Be afraid only of standing still.” -- Chinese Proverb