Forever 21

  We Become What We Repeatedly Do! What Are You Doing?

Forever 21, ever heard of it? It’s a trendy store brand that makes affordable versions of the most popular fashions. They even make some of the trends in plus size. Well they go up to a 20 that’s what I call regular plus ( size 12-20) true plus are those sizes 22 and up…but I digress that’s not at all what this post is about 🙂 this post is about habits!

Just 3 short weeks ago we all proclaimed “This Year is going to be different”. We made the plan and started the program, but are we sticking to it? One of my proclamations for 2015 was to take better care of my hair. I have said before I am kinda the lazy natural sometimes. I’ve been creating a habit of twisting my hair every night. I usually wear protective styles so I only have to touch it once a week on wash day, but this year I’ve been wearing it loose, which requires me to have to touch it and moisturize everyday. I have been creating a habit of good hair care practices for 2015.

This idea is to get these habits to become automated, thereby creating a greater chance that this habits will be part of your life forever. If going to the gym, or exercising is a task that you want to make a habit, get ready for the long hall! Research shows that it takes over 200 days for this automatism to occur. Good luck to us! Try using post it flags, as a reminder, number them from 1-21 and everyday you accomplish the said task remove that number.

Forever is such a long time to have a bad habits. So look back over your first 21 days of this year, what have you done most often? These are your 2015 habitual behaviors. If you’ve had a piece of cake every night after dinner, this is not productive to your weight loss goals, you have to stop. What do we do if that thing we’ve been doing is not something we want to keep forever? The brainiacs say we can replace a bad habit with a lesser evil. So let’s say you smoke a cigarette ( not sure who’s rich enough to still smoke) every night after you eat. Instead of smoking a cigarette you now take a walk or drink a couple glasses of water. Once the behavior is automated its with you forever. As you can tell that after dinner time for people like me is a fertile garden for adding good habits.

Sometimes we can get into the habit without even realizing. “We are what we repeatedly do,” Aristotle proclaimed. Therefore we have to be conscious of our behaviors to avoid getting into a rut! As I was doing the research for this post I realize I have quite a few bad habits that I have unintentionally developed. I have made a habit of checking Instagram before I get out of bed, this will stop. I have replaced it with praying and giving thanks as soon as I wake up. THEN I check Instagram 🙂 … just kidding! But this is a case where I hadn’t even realized that I was creating a habit.

So we have some good habits and some bad habits but we want to keep the good ones forever and make a conscious effort to change the bad ones 21 times. Make our habits forever 21.

We can’t truly stay 21 years old forever, but we can change our forevers on a 21 day cycle. Remember we may not look 21 years old, but we can stay forever 21 with good habits. It takes 21 days to create a habit. Why not start today?

See ya Phatty