upci general conference
The fact is that the majority of our thoughts and actions are on autopilot. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing either. Our habits, routines, impulses, and reactions carry us through our lives so we don’t have to stop and think about it every time we wipe our ass or start a car.
The problem is that we’ve lost our ability to control our thoughts. We cannot control what we think, but we can control how we think. A person with a high degree of self-awareness can exercise a little meta-cognition and say, “Hmm… every time my sister calls me and asks for money, I end up drinking a lot of vodkas.
The solution is to stop thinking about it and instead start thinking about it. You can start by thinking about which of your habits, routines, impulses, and reactions you want to change. Then you can decide how to put these things into action. For example, if you want to stop eating sugary foods, you can just eat less sugary foods, and this in itself might lead to healthier habits and better willpower. If you want to stop smoking cigarettes, you can just stop smoking, etc.
A great way to start thinking about your habits, routines, impulses, and reactions is to focus on your past and imagine what you would do if you found yourself in that situation. Then you can choose to change your habits or routines or impulses or reactions you have.
The problem is most of us are pretty good at following our own advice. But when you look back on your past and see how many bad habits you have, you’re going to wonder why you didn’t do more to change them.
It’s not like you can magically change your bad habits or bad behaviors or bad impulses or bad reactions. It just takes a lot of time and effort, and usually a failure to change something is a failure to change anything. The point is, you might get stuck in a pattern of bad habits or bad reactions and then it might not be easy to break out of that pattern.
The point is that the problem is not just bad habits and bad reactions, but more so that we’re not even aware of them. We’re not aware of the bad habits and bad reactions we keep going back to because they’re happening automatically. We’re unaware of the patterns we’ve created that cause us to keep hitting the bottle.
We all got into a cycle of bad habits and bad reactions. But were not aware of it because we were so busy feeling good about ourselves that we completely ignored the parts of ourselves that are a failure to change.
This goes back to the original point about the importance of self-awareness. Self-awareness is not just about being aware of behaviors and habits, it is about being aware of our patterns of thought and behavior. And while our patterns are so ingrained and so rigid that we hardly feel the need to change them, they are often so hard for us to change that we never even know that we have changed.
Our patterns are not hard to change, and the only part of ourselves that seems to have changed is our ability to change them. In other words, there is a part of us that doesn’t change because it is so hard to change, and there is a part of us that doesn’t change because it is so easy to change.