Each day is a new day to make a commitment to your goals. Whatever change you’re looking to make, whatever behavior you’re looking to modify, is a choice you make daily. You cannot make future commitments any more than you can alter past moments. The past is now just a memory and the future is mental activity also. The only moment you can choose your behavior is this one. There is only this moment. If you’ve made mistakes, if you’ve geared off your chosen path toward some change, acknowledge these mistakes and let them go. Let them go. If you can learn from them, then do so, but let them go. Don’t count them or dwell on them.
If you spend your time paying attention to the mistakes or the errors, you are only constructing mental obstacles that prevent you from reemerging on your chosen path. A focus on your failed attempts will only create mental mountains where there are none. When you count your “failures” and give them your attention, you mentally begin to construct your chosen goal as something nearly impossible to achieve. You say things like “it’s too hard” or “I’m not strong enough to do this for three months” or some other kind of mental barrier forms. These thoughts are of no use to you. Focusing on them will only drive you away from your chosen goal. There is no tomorrow or three months from now. Your moment of choosing is this one, and this one alone. And that’s how you have to allow yourself to do this. From moment to moment, in small steps. Just like you climb a mountain one step at a time, so must you defray the patterns of old habits step by step.
The focus on failures births thoughts that tell you your chosen goal is beyond your reach. These kinds of thoughts are not of help to you in any way, so it’s a good idea to learn from your mistakes and then let them go. Affirm that this new day is the day that you’re getting back on track. You can create affirmations or mantra’s to help you stay on track. It takes a firm decision and requires a strengthening of your will power to change any kind of habit. Affirmations can help you with this – they can help you remember on a daily bases what your chosen goal is. They can remind you what it is you’re trying to do. In fact, affirmations will invite useful thoughts to circle into your mind. These thoughts can be your personal cheerleaders in changing up your old patterns.
Modifying or changing behaviors, whether it’s eating healthy, quitting smoking, or something else, is like learning how to do something new. The new behavior you are trying to bring about is combating your habituated old ways. Habits create grooves in your mind. And in order to eliminate or replace an old habit, you have to consciously get rid of all the thoughts that are a product of this habit. You are essentially learning to create new habits and reprogram your mind and your brain. Habits, whether good or bad, take time to form and they take practice to get rid of. It takes repetition. It takes repeated successful attempts to form, and it takes repeated successful attempts to change them.
If at first you don’t succeed, no problem. There’s really no problem. You can try today for this day is a new day. There is no yesterday. Yesterday’s choices are gone. Don’t bow down and worship your past mistakes. Let them go. Make your choice today, and let this be your daily approach.
a contemporary thinker and published writer on personal development, spirituality, and self-re-discovery. She writes on various topics in the mind-body-spirit connection drawing from her education, various wisdom texts, and personal experiences.