Discover a fresh lens to view your daily routines as I, Sean, guide you through the murky waters of distinguishing 'normal' from 'habitual' behavior. This episode is a deep dive into why embracing the habitual nature of our actions can be a pivotal step towards personal transformation. As your performance coach with a special operations background, I bring to the table a unique perspective on how the acceptance of 'business as usual' can be a silent saboteur of growth. By identifying and labeling our behaviors as habits, we grant ourselves the power to alter our life's trajectory. Plus, I introduce you to 'gravity problems,' a concept that underscores the importance of discerning when to fight for change and when to yield to the inevitable.
The language we use to describe our actions can either be a cage or a key. In this episode, I unravel the influence of our word choices on behavior and why substituting 'normal' with 'habitual' can be a game-changer. We'll tackle common pitfalls, like emotional eating, not just as bad habits but as opportunities for intentional change. This change in terminology can liberate us from needless self-pressure and open up new avenues for growth—whether you're on a solo journey of self-improvement or leading a team. Join me in this empowering exploration that challenges you to question the choices that shape your life, setting the stage for a more aware and deliberate existence.
Are you an executive, entrepreneur, or combat veteran looking to overcome subconscious blind spots and limiting messaging to unlock your highest performance? Feel free to reach out to Sean at Reload Coaching and Consulting.
Discover a fresh lens to view your daily routines as I, Sean, guide you through the murky waters of distinguishing 'normal' from 'habitual' behavior. This episode is a deep dive into why embracing the habitual nature of our actions can be a pivotal step towards personal transformation. As your performance coach with a special operations background, I bring to the table a unique perspective on how the acceptance of 'business as usual' can be a silent saboteur of growth. By identifying and labeling our behaviors as habits, we grant ourselves the power to alter our life's trajectory. Plus, I introduce you to 'gravity problems,' a concept that underscores the importance of discerning when to fight for change and when to yield to the inevitable.
The language we use to describe our actions can either be a cage or a key. In this episode, I unravel the influence of our word choices on behavior and why substituting 'normal' with 'habitual' can be a game-changer. We'll tackle common pitfalls, like emotional eating, not just as bad habits but as opportunities for intentional change. This change in terminology can liberate us from needless self-pressure and open up new avenues for growth—whether you're on a solo journey of self-improvement or leading a team. Join me in this empowering exploration that challenges you to question the choices that shape your life, setting the stage for a more aware and deliberate existence.
Are you an executive, entrepreneur, or combat veteran looking to overcome subconscious blind spots and limiting messaging to unlock your highest performance? Feel free to reach out to Sean at Reload Coaching and Consulting.
Welcome to the reload, where we help unconventional leaders craft the life they truly want by questioning the assumptions they have about how life works. My name is Sean and I'll be your host on this journey. As a performance coach and special operations combat veteran, I help high performing executives kick ass in their careers while connecting with deeply powerful insights that fuel their lives. All right, welcome once more. I think I've been saying that a lot lately. I'll try to come up with some new greeting for you, but hey, here we are. So today I wanted to shoot off a pretty quick, hopefully, episode addressing the difference between quote unquote, normal and habitual. And the reason for this is I've been seeing a lot of people struggling with this in my coaching sessions with them. So why this is relevant, not just the frequency with which I see it, but the impact that it has on one's perspective and then how it tends to influence one's behavior, one's choices, right? So there's always in play this notion of going from perception or mindset. And then how does that cascade into the choices that we make and then the behaviors that we enact. So this idea of normal so frequently, what I get from individuals that I work with as a coach, and then also what I hear in my friendships and conversations with family, and then also where I catch myself doing the exact same thing. So one thing I want to make clear before we go any further is the fact that I do a lot of these things myself. So in no way am I attempting to hold myself out there as some sort of paragon of virtue. What I am attempting to do instead is to communicate that as a coach not just with the training that I have, not just with the experiences that I have in terms of coaching individuals, but then also the awareness that has been sort of drummed into me over the years of doing this work I come from a perspective that oftentimes allows me to be observant in ways that most people typically are not, and part of my role as the coach at least as I see it with my clients, is to try to help them think and observe more like a coach themselves so that they can better coach themselves.
Speaker 1:Now, with that disclaimer in place, let's dive in. So when I hear from a lot of folks is well, you know, it's normal, how do I get past this when this is so normal? This is just how our relationship is, or this is just how the team is, or this is just how the company is, or the organization is. So even at the beginning, well, even before the beginning, right in our unconscious, we're already admitting defeat, as it were. And I don't mean that literally, obviously, but where it is that we have already started to kind of give up, based on the fact that our perception is that the stack is against us, or, better said, the deck is stacked against us. I'm a little flustered today, apparently.
Speaker 1:Now, when we look at this notion of what is normal, when we slap that label normal onto something, what we're really saying to ourselves is that this is how things ought to be. We think about the inverse abnormal. Whether we're throwing that label on a process or a person, now that person's weird, they're abnormal. And if you think about every teenager out there, I'm assuming one of their primary goals as a teenager is to be normal, to not stand out from the crowd. Because often when we go through our formative teenage years, we are in a position where we feel awkward. We feel that we're unsettled in our sense of self, which makes sense because we're growing still. We're still trying to understand. Yeah, well, what are the things that make up who I am or what I wanna be. So this moniker or this label of normal or abnormal if we wanna look at the side that feels more punishing, there's a lot of sort of inner investment that has happened over the years to attempt to conform and to attempt to be normal, to be totally circular.
Speaker 1:Now, when we look at the power of that word, you also sometimes clients will get clever with me and they will say, well, we just need to normalize, we just need to. And if you've listened to some of my other podcast episodes, you know how much I start to pay attention when somebody throws just need in front of whatever they're about to say. But they'll say, well, we just need to normalize this. And what are they really trying to communicate to me? What they're really trying to communicate to me or to themselves or to others, is that we're going to trauma, to massage, whatever.
Speaker 1:This new way of doing things is into acceptance. Because oftentimes, when we have actually gone to the point inside of ourselves, whether that's in our head or our heart or our guts doesn't matter, but when we're in this position where we actually normalize something, it is often sort of set in stone. The problem with setting something in stone. The problem with thinking that the environment is simply the way it is and could never be changed is that you don't do anything about it. You don't actually seek to improve the situation.
Speaker 1:Now there are certain ways in which, for instance, there was a book that I read years ago, written by some folks out of Stanford, that talked about the quote unquote gravity problem, and their whole point was trying to really actually understand the limits of your ability to control or influence a situation, and what they meant when they said gravity problem is they were talking about the fact that as a mortal human being on Earth, you are going to experience a sense of gravity, as in planet gravitational pull, and there's nothing as a mortal human that you will do to change the fact that the planet Earth has a certain amount of gravity that it affects on everybody, that's, in everything that's on it. Now we artificially and erroneously create gravity problems by mislabeling something as normal instead of calling it habitual. And here I think language really matters, and obviously long-time listeners of the show know how frequently I jump into the dictionary to try to understand the definition of a word and also to understand what is the etymological root of that word, and so the power of words cannot be understated. And that simple shift of and you can try this in your own life I recommend that you observe this in others before you try to do this for yourself. Observe how often individuals in your life whether that's at work, at home, whatever how often individuals will say that something is normal and then ask yourself internally I guess, how loud if you wanna look like a crazy person, an abnormal person, ask yourself, what if we use the label habitual instead? What happens? What happens to our willingness to tweak the process, or to tweak the organizational culture, or to tweak my own understanding of whether I can change myself, my relationship with someone? Oh well, you know, bob is just an asshole, it's normal, that's just how he is. Versus, bob is an asshole or he's acting like an asshole right now, and it seems to be pretty habitual for him to act that way. I don't know about you. I mean, it's quite possible that you're listening to this and thinking to yourself God, this is Sean, guys full of shit. In which case, carry on.
Speaker 1:But oftentimes, this is what I found in going through these conversations with numerous clients is when we create that linguistic shift and we shift from oh, that's normal to oh, that's habitual. It causes us to start to look at yeah, okay. Well, if it's habit, where did that habit come from? We all have bad habits and we all have good habits, so there's clearly a capacity for us to have this notion of habitual behavior go in either direction and, to the extent that you have bad habits, you might have already started to look at well, why do I have this bad habit?
Speaker 1:Let's say it's eating junk food. Why do you have the habit of eating junk food? Maybe you eat junk food when you are emotionally stressed and what you're really doing is you're trying to self soothe. So really, what you're trying to get across, or the goal that you're really trying to accomplish, is soothing, soothing, ha, you would think that I don't do this very often. Soothing there we go, soothing yourself.
Speaker 1:If that's really the goal and you recognize that you have been inappropriately, at least according to maybe your value set, been reaching for the junk food instead of something that is a healthier option of soothing, then you can begin to change that when, if you simply call it normal that you do something, it starts to fall below the radar of inquiry. It starts to fall below that threshold of. Is this something that I'm going to do something about? Am I going to start to challenge this? Because we often don't challenge things that are normal, but we are willing, at least from what I've seen and what people have admitted to me, they are more willing to challenge things that they think are habitual. For some reason and I don't quite know what it is, but then potentially the reasons I've already given there is something in the human psyche that is willing to challenge and assail a habit more so than normalcy.
Speaker 1:Now, once you have gone through that exercise of observing other people's use of the word normal and then internally asking yourself what if they use the word habitual instead, and what would we potentially be able to do if we looked at it more as habit than as a state of normalcy, how might we make things better? Well, from there, I think it's really useful to start to look at your own language, and this is something that I've had to do in the past and that I continue to do is to really scrutinize where it is that I am using the term normal and to be very intentional with when and where and how I end up using the word normal and then replacing it. In most instances, because of the number of times that I have inappropriately used the term normal with the term habitual and in my own experience, and maybe yours will be the same I've noticed that, again, replacing normal with habitual puts me in a position to have greater awareness, greater insight into why I'm making certain choices or why I'm avoiding making other choices, to then really get serious about creating the future state that I want, whether those are fitness goals, whether those are relationship goals. Now, obviously, relationship goals can be tricky, and I would say tricky or difficult, because of the fact that they involve another person or another party, let's say and in that, you as the initiator of this process of inquiry and this process of change, you're not in it by yourself. And this is definitely something that comes forward when I work with clients and help them create objectives that they want to achieve through the coaching of the people about how much of their objectives are interconnected with another person's participation.
Speaker 1:But even when you're dealing with multiple people or just one other person, you still have the option and you still have the empowerment to really start to look at okay, what if we collectively started to observe our language and we started to really recognize where it was that we were mislabeling things as normal, and would it benefit us in some tangible way to start to call it habitual instead? And even this sort of initial mapping conversation can be tremendously empowering, for the group as well, or the pair, because most of the time people don't, people don't ask themselves these weird questions. That's why you go to a coach or a therapist is to have somebody start to really sort of shake up the paradigm. And so even asking yourself or the group asking itself okay, what might be the benefit if we look at this process or this way of having meetings or insert whatever example is relevant for you, and instead of calling something normal, we actually just really get serious about saying, okay, what if this is just habit? What if the unproductive meetings that we keep happening are not normal? But what if it's habitual? And then what are the behaviors that have gone into and the mindset that have gone into creating this habitual state, and what would we need to address if we were really serious about changing it?
Speaker 1:And here's another funny thing when we go from mislabeling something as normal to appropriately labeling it as habit assuming that it is actually, you know, habit, I would say, if there are sort of things like the sun rises in the east, yeah, that's normal, and so if all of a sudden it rose in the west, that would probably mean the planet was coming undone. But you know, in the realm of human behavior, oftentimes you're looking more at normal than you are sorry, you're looking more habitual than you are at normal. So, to really get clear on what we need to do to change it, now in that process of really starting to scrutinize, okay, if we are calling this habit and we're going to start to really get serious about asking and looking at what we would need to do to change it, well, the hidden benefit in there is you may actually come to the conclusion we don't care enough to change it or I don't care enough to change it, in which case you don't have to stress about it anymore. You can recognize that you have some bad habits and you're at peace with living with them, and you don't have to sort of get stuck in this messy middle where you think, oh God, I really need to do something about this, and then you don't, and then you feel like you're letting yourself down or you're letting other people down. Right, so there's this clarity that can come with saying, okay, I have a bad habit, I used to call it normal, but now I see that it's a bad habit.
Speaker 1:I looked at behaviors in the mindset that go into this bad habit and, presto, change. Oh, I don't care, I'm willing to keep this bad habit. And then there you go, Be free. Now, of course, there are going to be some bad habits that you do want to change, which then again you get clarity. You get clarity about why you're doing the thing you're doing and it's not just some quote-unquote normal thing that just happens, just happens. So I know it's a little bit wobbly all over the place today. Hopefully, hopefully, next time I will be a bit less scattered. And if you did enjoy today's episode and a little bit of laughter that I was able to throw in here and there, why don't you go ahead and hit that like button, thumbs up, subscribe whatever and share it with people, people you care about, people who might want to get a laugh out of my stumbling and fumbling today, or don't Totally out to you. Until next time. Take care of each other.