Managing your habits

Managing your habits                                                                   230111

                Weeds are plants just like the crops you grow. If given a chance, however, they will thrive better than the desired crops. If you see weeds growing well in a piece of land, it means crops will also do well there. The difference is that weeds can flourish without any attention. On the other hand, lot of work has to be done if plants will do equally well.

                Everyone has some bad habits that he/she is trying to overcome. These are revealed at the beginning of the year when many people sit down to write their New Year’s resolutions. On the list are one or two things that must be stopped. These are the undesirable habits we are talking about.

                If you look closely in your life you will see one such habit that you do not want at all, but it keeps resurfacing every time. There is good news for you. The fact that a bad habit like that one is thriving in you means that you are fertile ground for good habit also. All that is needed is to manage your habits to make the good ones to do better than the bad ones.

                Weeds use different tactics to make sure they do better than the crops planted where they grow. The bad habits in us use the same tactics as well if you understand these tactics you can get rid of bad habits in your life. Weeds usually grow very fast so that they overshadow their rivals and get more sunshine for their growth. In doing so, they starve the crops of the much needed energy to grow. To ensure this, they have big leaves that will block sunlight from anything that grows under them.

Good habits, like the crops we grow, take time to develop. Bad ones on the other end grow faster. Soon they are taking the time needed for developing good ones. If you are not careful the bad habits will soon be taking all your time and strengthening themselves in the process. Every habit needs time to develop, and bad ones try to overshadow good ones by denying them the time to grow. If you want good habits to thrive, give them the time needed for them to grow. If you give time to the good habits, the bad ones will have no time to grow and dominate. You can starve bad habits of the attention they need and they will eventually die.

You have only twenty-four hours in a day and if you deliberately decide to schedule time for the habits that you want to develop, soon there will be no time for bad habits. That way you will slowly grow good habits at the expense of bad ones.

Weeds sometimes grow underground and show only a few leaves that they use to make their food. If you are not careful you will think that there are very few weeds in the field while they are busy finishing the nutrients for your crops. The impact of these weeds is difficult to appreciate because the damage is done out of sight. The damage is there, all the same, and something must be done about these weeds before they damage your crops. The way to go is to uproot them using a digging method. These are desperate moments and desperate measures are required to correct them. These weeds will not go by simple means like uprooting. They need you to go to the very roots and kill them from there.

There are habits that will need drastic measures to be removed. These will not go because you wish them away. Ignoring them will not help either. They will grow out of sight but when you see the effects later on, they will be so big you cannot ignore them. The time to act is when you see the few signs of these devastating habits. If you wait till the end there is no good habit that will grow in those circumstances. The best way to know such a habit exists is when all the good ones you try to grow seem to wither and die. Find the underlying habit that takes the nutrients away from your desired habits.

Weeds need to be removed constantly if you will win a war against them. They grow quickly and produce seeds fast. In one farming season you may find yourself fighting against the second generation of weeds. The best way to fight the war is to make sure these weeds do not produce seeds. It is an awesome task but that way you will be guaranteed of eliminating some species completely. Every time you enter the field, make sure you pull out one or two weeds. That way you will not give some of them time to mature. If you wait until the field is covered in weeds it may be difficult to remove them all in the scheduled weeding time. Look for bad behavior everyday and stop before it grows to become a habit that affects your life. This way you are in control. Once behavior grows to be habitual, you have to do more work to change it. You can manage your habits by destroying bad ones and encouraging the growth of good ones by giving them time to develop.