By: Joseph Kolodziej
Tell me if you’ve been here: You open your eyes and you have just gained consciousness after a frustratingly up-and-down night of sleep and before you even realize that you have the chance to embark upon a brand new day, you think to yourself, ‘here we go again, another day to deal with.’ Has this been you? It’s certainly been me more than I care to admit. Before most days truly began we are in the mode of burying them in agony and doubt—before anything new even happens!
And why? Momentum. Any type of behavior that repeats in both thought and action tends to build up a force of momentum with it and with that momentum gains its’ own kind of velocity and power. It happens in both good and bad areas in life. We may have a great deal of experience with negative momentum, assuming the role of victim—but we’re in desperate want of change. But how do we do it? We first make a committment. For example, by deciding to spend the time and thought to write this article, I am giving myself a worthy commitment and a responsibility; we can all use goals, commitments and responsibilities to create more of what we want in life. These types of things create momentum shifts in our lives. Simply, here’s how it breaks down:
1. We make a goal to function better and improve our lives
2. We make commitments that foster that functioning and get the ball rolling.
3. We develop responsibilities through those commitments and the process naturally repeats itself in a repetitive cycle.
Fundamentally, here’s how we can approach day one with our new goal of self-improvement:
When we first embark on this new mode, from the very moment we awake in the morning, we decide from our first thought that we want something to be different: to be precise, we create a force of thought that triggers momentum in a new and precise direction. The direction of that thinking creates another step in the form of a question: ’If we want something different, something new, and something precise—what are I we going to do about it? Are we going to carry that momentum of thought into action and pair it with a goal. We say to ourselves, ‘If we want to do this, we will do this, and we will accomplish this because now we understand how to do so’ and so on.
This same principle, though often cloaked in disguise is what keeps us shackled when we roam about our daily lives not understanding why nothing is changing. We then can get stuck in powerful negative ruts, standing in one spot, because the momentum of habitually thinking the same way over, and over again creates the same patterns of action over, and over again and this is the velocity of negativity, it picks up speed through our force and uses momentum and repetition for it’s power. It’s a lonely place to be no doubt, but once we know how to flip this pattern around and use these forces to help us develop the new habits we want, we I realize we don’t have to stay shackled and the keys to the chains are given to us. We create courage from eventually learning that change in our thoughts create change in our actions, and learn also that our changes in action eventually lead us to accomplishing our goals and accomplishing my goals and the cycle naturally repeats itself for us.
In short, but with much practice and study, we use this model habitually and in time get better at knowing how to how ’keep on keepin on’ in the face of colossal challenges and obstacles. This is our greatest controllable variable and exponential weapon against the effects of negative volition. In closing, I’ll borrow a time-honored passage with a twist at the end and offer it to our collective memories: ‘May the force be with us and work for us—not against us.’
Be well. Act well. End well. Repeat.
