Coaching…for a Change: Practice Makes Permanent

“As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives." — Henry David Thoreau??

The quote above is largely attributed to Henry David Thoreau, essayist and poet who inspired generations of great human beings like Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and George Bernard Shaw, just to name a few. But there are some folks who beg to differ. Either way, it eloquently describes how the brain learns and forms habits.

Habits play a special role during a transformation process or when trying to achieve a goal. This is because the actions that make up a habit either support your end state or prevent you from reaching it.

Let's take the age-old goal of weight loss, for example. If you have a habit of eating junk food and not exercising, and do not have the kind of genes that enable you to do these things without gaining weight, you will continue to gain weight. However, if you change those habits to eating healthy and exercising, you may be able to not only lose the weight, but keep it off.

But habits, as the quote above alludes to, do not form over night; and they definitely don't stick around with one try. It takes practice and more important, consistency. Your brain is hardwired to learn. But it can only do so with repetition. SCIENCE ALERT!!This is through, among other things, neuroplasticity. I won't go into specifics, but the more you help your brain make neural connections, the stronger those connections become; until they become automatic.

Working with a coach can help you identify small actions you can do and maintain over a certain period of time. The idea is to incorporate differences so small, you don't have to think about them. And once they become automatic, identify additional small actions, and so forth. The goal is to mitigate the overwhelm that comes with changing or forming a new habit. And when you're not overwhelmed, you're most likely to do it over and over...and over again, until it becomes the new habit that gets you to where and/or who you want to be.