Free The Practicing Mind: Developing Focus and Discipline in Your Life by Thomas M. Sterner Page A

some effort, but the effort is minimal once we understand the process. What is required is that you are aware of what you want to achieve, that you know the motions you must intentionally repeat to accomplish the goal, and that you execute your actions without emotions or judgments; just stay on course. You should do this in the comfort of knowing that intentionally repeating something over a short course of time will create a new habit or replace an old one.
    Sports psychologists have gotten very consistent results when studying habit formation. One study statesthat repeating a particular motion sixty times a day over twenty-one days will form a new habit that will become ingrained in your mind. The sixty repetitions needn’t be done all at once but can be broken up into, say, six sets of ten or two sets of thirty during the day. In sports, this type of method can be used to change a certain aspect of a golf swing, or to naturalize any other aspect of a sports motion.
    I shoot target archery. The way in which you draw the bow to full tension, and when and how you breathe, is art of good form. Practicing the proper motions many times a day over many days creates a habit of motion that feels right and natural and is done without conscious thought. However, you can just as easily haphazardly draw the bow and huff and puff, and that will also become a learned habit. That is why you must be aware that you are forming a habit, know what you want to accomplish, and apply yourself with intentional effort.
    Replacing undesirable habits works in the same way. I am sure you have experienced trying to change something that you have done in a certain way for a long time. Initially, the new way feels very strange and awkward because you are moving against the old habit. But in a short period of time, through deliberate repetition, the new way feels normal, and moving back to the old way would feel strange. Once I learned this, the knowledge took much of the stress out of learning something new. It became much easier to stay in the process of doing something newbecause I wasn’t experiencing all the anticipation that results from not having any idea of how long it would take to learn something new. I would just relax and repeat the exercise and stay in the process, knowing that the learning was occurring. Yes, I was applying effort, but there was no sense of struggle. I have used this process extensively while honing my golf skills and learning new passages of music, but also in more personality-related changes.
    When I identified something in my behavior that I felt was holding me back or producing undesirable results, I would realize that I had already fulfilled the awareness part of the equation. I would then objectively decide where I wanted to end up and which motions would get me there. Next, I worked through those motions without emotion, knowing that many intentional repetitions over a short period of time would create the behavior I was after. There was no need to fret over it. I would just stay with it and know that I was where I should be right “now” and that I was becoming what I wanted to be, accomplishing what I needed to accomplish.
    This process works very well, and the more you experience it working, the more confidence you’ll have in your ability to shape yourself and your life into whatever you want.
    But what if you want to replace an unproductive habit, such as watching too much TV or reacting in a negative way to sharp comments from a coworker, with a desirable habit, one that is more in line with the person you havedecided you want to be? How do you stop the momentum of an old habit? To help us with this, we can use a technique called a trigger. For our purposes here, a trigger is a device that serves to start the creation process of the new habit. It’s sort of a wake-up call, a whistle blow or a bell ring, that alerts you that you are in a situation where you want to replace your previous response with this