Episode 19: Full Circle: The Art and Impact of Habits on Personal and Cultural Growth

Discover the silent shapers of our everyday existence as we journey through the world of habit formation. This episode isn't just another run-of-the-mill discussion; it's a personal and cultural expedition into the practices that sculpt our lives, both mundane and significant. From the evolution of my own dental hygiene to the punctuality drilled into me by the military, I, Shawn, peel back the layers of routine to reveal their profound impact on our personal growth and professional success. We'll dissect the mechanics of habit formation and alteration, dissecting the perseverance needed to cement new behaviors and the delicate art of replacing the old.

As we traverse the globe in our conversation, the cultural tapestry of habits comes alive, illustrating the stark contrasts in financial behaviors and the norms that govern our daily actions. You'll learn how accountability can be the bedrock of change and why the smallest steps can lead to the most significant transformations. Tune in for an intimate look at the habits that define who we are, who we want to become, and how to ensure they resonate with our deepest values and aspirations. This is Full Circle, where we connect every thread of our being into one coherent narrative of personal development and cultural understanding.

Transcript

Speaker 0: 0:00

Hello and welcome back to Full Circle with Sean. I'm your host, sean, and today, as promised, we're talking about habits. So we'll be talking about good habits, bad habits, the outcomes of habits and how they really define our life in a way. And I just want to make it clear that I have bad habits and I know what bad habits I have and I work with habits and I try to set goals to reduce or change the mentality around some of the habits that I have, and we'll talk about that. So let's start with, as we do on every show, what is a habit, right? So a habit is a repeatable behavior that individuals perform automatically, and it's usually ingrained through frequent repetition and triggered by specific cues or context. Habits are part of our brain, right, so they save energy and mental effort by automatically doing things, and that's what a habit is.

Speaker 0: 1:01

So what are some healthy habits? So, regular exercise, right. We start going to the gym and it's tough and we tough it out and a year later, after going to the gym a couple times a week, we couldn't see life any other way. We start looking forward to it. It is something that we do A balanced diet. We eat healthy. We have this plan and going outside of that would be weird, because it's just a normal thing we do. We go to the store and we pick up whole wheat bread because we don't think of anything else. It's just what we get. Sleep we go to bed at a certain time and we wake up at a certain time, and that's what we do, and maybe on weekends we sleep a little bit more. But we can have these really healthy habits. We can have learning habits so we can continuously learn. We can read, we engage with new ideas and I'll go back and say read again, because I think that's something that a lot of people don't do anymore. They don't take the time to read because what is reading Reading is slower Reading is you have to slow down to read and, yeah, some people speed read, but you know what I mean. You actually take the time you read, you imagine what's going on and that's a really good de-stressing mechanism as well reading. We have mental health habits, so mindfulness practices, stress management techniques, stuff like that that you can do to really help your mental health.

Speaker 0: 2:39

In our professional life we have habits for productivity, which can include prioritizing time management and uses of tools and technology. We have communication habits, so we're used to regular updates how we communicate with people, clear and concise, and a skill of active listening and I talked about active listening before, but it can become a habit as you learn it. It's something that you just do. You have teamwork habits, so your collaboration, your respect for diversity and constructive feedback, and, again with communication, how you talk to people. Leadership habits, so delegation, and some people say, well, delegating just means you don't have to do it, but it's a whole lot more than that with delegation and it also comes with trust of your team and trust of your leadership. You have motivation, inspiring trust and your resilience and I did a whole episode on resilience as well, and some other ones that I've just kind of skimmed over.

Speaker 0: 3:51

You have financial habits, so budgeting, saving, investing, how you do those things and how you spend money, your spending habits. Your social habits, so how you maintain relationships and engage in your social life. So there's a lot of habits in your normal life, right. But how do we build and how do we change our habits? Well, there's a few ways to do it, right, so you can have like a routine reward loop, right, so you understand, you identify a trigger. So this is going to happen and I'm going to do this and once I've done that, I'm going to reward myself for that. I mean, we do that with our pets right and we get the habits when they begin to learn what we want and it just becomes a habit.

Speaker 0: 4:42

Now, consistency in this kind of stuff is the key to building new habits. So you need to be consistent and a lot of times it's in small steps. So you need to break down the changes that you want, the changes you want to make, into small, manageable steps and at the same time, you need to be patient. You need to be patient because new habits can take time and they can take persistence and I did a whole talk on persistence but they really can take persistence. But everything's always settled in time. As long as you stick with it, time will make it happen for you. Long as you stick with it, time will make it happen for you.

Speaker 0: 5:28

Some of the tools and some techniques you can use to enhance your habits there's plenty of apps out there. You can use a journal. I use a journal quite a bit to monitor what I'm doing, what I want to do, what I want to do better, and I set clear goals, very specific goals, very measurable goals and achievable goals. So we need to be careful of setting. You know, I'm in the mood today. I'm in a super happy mood and I am going to do this with my life. That's it. I'm going to do this all the time I'm going to be.

Speaker 0: 6:01

You know, or, or even worse, you know you went out and, uh, spent money and you shouldn't have. Um, and you go, you know what, from now on, I am not going to spend anything. You know, I'm going to go the exact opposite of what I've always done. Uh, it's probably not going to be so achievable, you know you, you need to set milestones and you need to to work your way into it. Um, and your goals need to Um, and and time bound time bound would be be pretty good. Um, and then you know, accountability. So so the the one thing that's always hard for for us as individuals, right, is when we we want to do something for ourselves. So so you make a new year's resolution um, this year I'm not going to do do this for six months, you know. And then, um, oh, a day later, you're like I'm gonna do it, it doesn't matter, I'm just gonna do it. And because you're not accountable to anybody except yourself and you're willing to waive that accountability. So sometimes it's better if you can partner with somebody and mutually encourage each other to form the habits that you guys are trying to achieve.

Speaker 0: 7:09

Now, if we talk about bad habits, they can be really hard to break right. So bad habits are often automatic, so specific triggers they're hard to break. They're unconscious decisions and some of them can have stress and emotional relief. So bad habits are often formed because they form some part of emotional or stress relief, such as smoking or maybe even overeating. A lot of them are neurological rewards, so they can hijack the brain's reward system, releasing like dopamine which reinforces the habit loop. Some bad habits are environmental and social factors, so say your surroundings and social circles can reinforce and perpetuate bad habits, making them even harder to break. And a lot of times bad habits you don't know you have them. It's a lack of awareness, you're not fully aware of the habits and how much you rely on them, which can make it really really difficult. So if we want to begin to address breaking our bad habits, we obviously need to identify those habits and be aware, so recognize the trigger and what the outcomes of the habit are. Awareness is obviously the first step to change and it's the first step to a lot of things and I touch on it quite often on this podcast is reflection and awareness Substitution. So you can substitute with positive habits, right, so replace a bad habit with a more beneficial one.

Speaker 0: 8:50

Incremental changes. So sometimes you can't break that bad habit and, like I said, I have some. I am a smoker and I do reflect on that quite often and I cut down and I've went a couple months without it before and it's just really, really hard, right, and I'm military or I was military and I just I don't have the discipline and I make excuses to myself. But I try to reflect on that and you know it's one of my really bad habits that I am trying to break. But sometimes we have to work incremental. So we have to start with very small changes to gradually undo the habit loop and for me that's for that one habit I've been cutting down and I don't partake in certain circumstances anymore. So in my vehicle, no, for the first couple hours in the morning, no. So it is about those incremental changes and then support systems.

Speaker 0: 9:52

So friends, families, professionals who can provide support to help you, and if it is one of those social factors, then maybe you need a modification to your environment or your social group that can remove the cues or triggers associated with a bad habit. And I'm not saying just dump all your friends, but if you're one of the people that go out and you're not happy because you always partake that one extra drink that you shouldn't have, well then you know go out with your friends but you leave an hour early or you know you meet them in different situations, so there's always something that you can do. And then the mindfulness and the stress management behind it. So you need to find techniques that can help you to make more conscious choices and really try to adopt healthier ways to manage the stress that comes with changing habits. I mean, have you ever, if you're into socials, if you're big into socials, have you ever tried not to check your phone for a day? Well, that can be quite stressful, right, because we have this need, we have this habit and we need to see what's going on. And it digs into our brain because we formed it over such a period of time and that's why I don't do Facebook or anything. And I did back in the day a long time ago and I did MySpace before that. Yeah, myspace, right, but that was a habit that I changed.

Speaker 0: 11:22

And even gaming, like so, gaming on my iPad. I used to game on my iPad every once in a while and I got really into that. And I used to game on my iPad every once in a while and I got really into that and I got to thinking about it and I was thinking, wow, I spent a lot of time doing that and I'm actually coming home from work and eating something and then I'm like, ah, I want to play that game and there's so much more things that I could have been doing during that time. I don't want to do that anymore and so I stopped and I was aware of that. So, yeah, I'm not saying don't check your phone all day, because sometimes you need to check your phone, but there's healthy and unhealthy ways of tech as well. That's just grown into our lives.

Speaker 0: 12:08

If you look at when I was in foster care, I mean I wasn't taught to take care of my teeth, okay, and and my teeth got really, really bad and and it was something that took me a long time to to form a habit because I just didn't do it Now. Now my children, they, they take care of their teeth and and I enforced that and I've enforced it for years and I I don't even have to say anything anymore it's, it's just, it's just normal. They, they know when they're going to go, brush their teeth and and it's just a normal habit and hopefully it stays with them for life and they have a, you know, healthy teeth and gums. But it's, it's. You can have an effect on other people, especially if you have children, on forming positive habits like that. But it takes work, okay, it didn't just all of a sudden. They brush their teeth every day just because I said something no, no, come upstairs, come on in the bathroom, Come on, brush your teeth Until they know that it's just going to happen. It's going to happen because I was persistent and it was going to happen, and now they just do it. It's not even a thing anymore, it's not a problem now.

Speaker 0: 13:16

One habit I learned in the military and was drilled into me was punctuality. You're always on time. In fact, you're always 15 minutes away early. And what's that's drilled into me is, since I've had a company, or even when I was working for somebody was, I would always be 15 minutes early. And it came to the point where I just figured is, you know, I'm, they're my customer and I should be waiting on them. They shouldn't be waiting on me. And that's instilled that into me, and I instill that into the team as well, because that's a really great habit to have.

Speaker 0: 13:50

But everywhere in, in different cultures, so lots of different cultures, you know, have have different habits and sometimes understanding the different habits is um, is good, but it's also, it's also kind of cool, right. So in say in in france, when they, when you first meet somebody, they, they kiss you on each cheek right, or two, three times, whatever, you know, kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss. And that's a habit, that's a normal greeting, it's habitual, but it might freak people out. So, like in New Zealand, you know, their greeting is, you know, pressing your nose and forehead against another person, and in some people that would freak them out, but that's one of their, one of their customs. It's, it's habits can be um, you know, shaped by your uh environment or or the social norms, in in the cultural differences, um that people have right.

Speaker 0: 14:44

And in Spain, you know, it's it's habit to have dinner around nine or later. In Japan, they sit on the floor on mats and it's customary to say like I receive before eating to show gratitude for the meal. And if we go back to punctuality, what I forgot to mention was, in Brazil, arriving 10 to 15, 10 to 30 minutes late for gatherings is acceptable and even expected, which would freak me out, because I would just freak out on that, right. So it's, it's your habits, but it's also a lot of times your habits are based on your culture as well, or you've been through like the military. The military taught me a lot of habits and if we look at you know financial habits.

Speaker 0: 15:41

In the US, you know, obviously the culture is more on spending and credit use and in India it's on savings, and in India, actually, they save a significant portion of their income for financial security because that's what they've been taught and that's important to their culture. So when we reflect on our culture, it's I mean just because you're from the USA doesn't mean that you have to have an emphasis on spending and credit use and in fact, that could have been a bad thing in your life and that could be a habit that you're trying to change more financial awareness and more control of your finances and saving for a black day, which I've talked about in another episode. But some of these can give our precondition when we're young. They can condition us with certain habits which might be acceptable in society and some of them are not what you want. And then you should go through, obviously, the steps we've talked about of breaking these habits or, you know, stepping out of these habits and changing the way that you want, because, again, it's about you. It's about what's good for you and where you are in your life and in your learnings and in your growth.

Speaker 0: 17:02

I mean, some of this stuff won't, some of the stuff I talk about won't be applicable to a lot of people.

Speaker 0: 17:09

There'll be certain aspects of it where your growth is not at the point where you're ready to hear that. And that's funny because I've had people through my life who have explained certain concepts that I now understand, that I just didn't understand and I might have wavered them on and been like, oh, yeah, yeah didn't understand. And I might have wavered them on and been like, oh, yeah, yeah, preach to the choir, right, I just wasn't ready to take that in. But that just goes back to. We all have our own growth, we're all at a certain point in our own life and it's good that we reflect on that, so, as I do. Yeah, so, so there's a that's the basics of habits and and habit forming and different cultures and and bad habits and breaking bad habits. So I hope you enjoyed this one and thank you again for for joining me on full circle with Sean, and in the next episode, we'll be talking about dealing with toxic people, so from families to friends, to work colleagues and even customers.