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There are so many good articles, books, and digital media that teach how to create and build positive habits. But one of the most important aspects of habit creation is understanding that you are also building a battery to help you maintain your positive habits in the future.
Habits take time, repetition and energy to build. The good news is that once a positive habit is formed, the very structure of how you built it works like a battery. More precisely, it works like a flywheel. A flywheel is a mechanical battery. Whereas the traditional battery stores the energy in a chemical form, a flywheel preserves the power in the form of movement. Through the time, repetition and daily energy you put into building a positive habit, you are spinning the flywheel and the faster you get it spinning the more inertia it will provide in the future against your habit stopping. This is true for all habits and why it is so important to power up the flywheel for your positive habits.
Consider the following Zen story (adapted from the writings of Thich Nhat Hanh)...about a man riding a horse. The horse is racing at breakneck speed through a village carrying a man bent over in the saddle, laser focused on the path ahead. Another man, standing alongside the road, shouts, “Where are you going?” and the first man replies, “I don’t know! Ask the horse!” This is also our story. We are riding a horse, we don’t know where we are going, and we can’t stop. The horse is our habit battery powering negative habits on a daily basis. The horse has a lot of inertia and therefore it is hard to slow it down or change its direction.
What habits do you have that you invest in each day with time, repetition, and energy that may not be serving you well?
By choosing to focus on new habits that take the place of older, more negative habits, you are choosing to put more time, repetitions and energy into getting the positive habit flywheel spinning. Not only that but, by focusing on the new habit, you are also slowing down the energy going into the negative habit flywheel. Both things are happening at the same time! Now, THAT is efficient!
Start spinning the positive habit flywheel and powering up your habit battery to help the good stuff stick even when things get tough.
Written by: Austin Meyermann, Founder and President of Hunter Crown, LLC
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