First we form habits, then they form us. Conquer your bad habits or they will conquer you.

– Dr. Rob Gilbert

Success is largely a function of habits. Habits might be things you do every day, every week, or every month, or they might be patterned responses you have to particular situations. For example, if you want to lose weight, adopting daily habits like eating a big breakfast, tapering your meals throughout the day, and drinking eight glasses of water will go a long way towards realizing that goal.

On the other hand, you might have a habit of focussing on solutions instead of problems, having conditioned yourself towards taking action and the belief that Output is God. This is not a specific, day-to-day ritual per se, but an empowering pattern of behaviour, which is still a kind of habit.

Consciously chosen, empowering habits accelerate your progress and allow you to customize reality to fit your desires. Bad habits, however, slow you down and eat away at your enjoyment of life.

So how do you replace a bad habit with a more effective alternative? In many cases, you’ll already know that something you’re doing is not conducive to the kind of life you want, and you’ll already have some idea of what you want to be doing instead. The hardest part is motivation. If you procrastinate, for example, you know what you should be doing, you just aren’t doing it.

In this article, I want to focus on turning up the volume on those negative patterns that you know are bad, but where you haven’t yet found the incentive to change. I want to offer a simple tool to intensify the negative energy you feel from engaging in bad habits, with the goal being to help you reach that breaking point where you know you must change.

The Power of Words

Words are, to some extent, just words. But they’re also more than that. Words are most effective when they invoke a shared context between the speaker and the listener. Words can trigger emotions that change lives, for better or worse. They are the primary transport for knowledge and ideas, and they are the most common storage format of all that we know.

Consider the impact that words have on your own life. Think about some of the books you’ve read and how they’ve shaped you. For example, I don’t know Tim Ferriss, but his book, The 4-Hour Workweek, changed my life. On page 276, he asked the question, “What makes you most angry about the state of the world?” My answer, that so many people choose to live at a fraction of their potential, led directly to the creation of 30 sleeps. They were “just words”, but it was a question whose answer launched me into purposeful motion.

I recently read Awaken the Giant Within, in which Tony Robbins devotes an entire chapter to what he calls “Transformation Vocabulary”. I already started practicing the power of vocabulary modifications well before reading this, but I found it interesting to add his point of view to that process.

When it comes to breaking bad habits, words are your weapon. The words you choose to describe your actions will affect the colour and flavour of your experiences. Too often, we talk about our bad habits in words that don’t convey the gravity of the situation. We describe profoundly self-defeating practices with the verbal equivalent of a slap on the wrist, even using words that carry no suggestion of bad behaviour at all.

When I talk about the power words have to change your life, I’m not suggesting that you do “positive affirmations”, i.e., repeat positive sentences to yourself that supposedly increase your confidence and condition you to higher performance. Frankly, positive affirmations are snake oil. Instead, I’m suggesting that you consider your own bad habits, and consciously choose to describe them with words that convey their destructive effects on your happiness and well-being.

Let’s walk through some common examples of negative patterns, especially those related to what I write about on this blog. We’ll see how a change in wording can increase your awareness of the damage being done. We’ll also see how choosing more descriptive words can rechannel your energy and emotions, to avoid self-defeating states of mind.

Procrastination

For all the devastation that procrastination has caused to humanity, it’s a word that has a remarkable way of sweeping all that damage under the rug. It almost sounds like some fetishistic form of self-pleasure. In reality, chronic procrastination is a terminal illness. Its effects on your life are at least as bad as smoking or alcoholism. If it doesn’t destroy your body–for example, that “someday” that you were going to start eating healthier came after your first heart attack–it will destroy your mind. It makes you feel stressed out and guilty and snowballs you along a downward slope of apathy.

Overcoming procrastination starts with being honest with yourself. If you’re serious about breaking out of this rut, instead of saying “I’m procrastinating”, choose more accurate and realistic alternatives:

• I’m destroying my life.
• I’m sabotaging myself.
• I’m self-destructing.

I realize these are potent statements, but I don’t think they’re hyperbole. For anyone who’s dealt with chronic procrastination, you can probably appreciate the truth these words contain. Again, notice that this isn’t about hollow affirmations. The point is to choose accurate descriptors for your bad habits, to increase your awareness of their effects on your life, and provide enough incentive to instigate change. You don’t necessarily need to say these things out loud, but in many cases (including the examples that follow), applying these wording changes even in conversation with others can be a powerful way to shock yourself into a new mode of being.

Have To vs. Want To

Your life belongs to you. The only two certainties in life are death and that everything else is negotiable. Convert all your have-tos to want-tos, and you’ll recapture the power and freedom of personal choice.

You don’t have to feel a certain way based on how a girl reacts to your approach. You don’t have to let some cheeseball, insecure, alpha pretender try to tool you. Letting other people drag you down requires your consent.

You don’t have to go to work today. You choose to, because food and shelter are nice things to have.

If this seems like a minor wording change, it is. But in my experience, this conscious reminder that everything you do is a choice, not an obligation, forces you to take ownership of your entire reality and grants you the authority to change any aspect of your life. Eliminating the words “I have to…” from your vocabulary will improve your quality of life.

For example, I don’t like having a boss. It hampers my authenticity and restricts my creativity to only that which someone else considers useful. I used to tell myself that “I have to look for consulting work” or “I have to work today” but that frame of mind only exaggerated the problem. “Have to” makes it sound like slavery.

When I reframed this as “I want to look for consulting work” or “I want to put in some hours on this today”, I reminded myself that, even though subordination isn’t ideal in the short-term, it was a conscious choice I made that aligned with my purpose. It allowed me to develop my skills as a software developer and UI designer, work with some world-class geeks along the way, and build my bankroll to the point where I now take mini-retirements to focus on projects of my own.

Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda

Woulda, coulda, shoulda are the three pillars of mental masturbation. The combined output of all the would-haves, could-haves, and should-haves in the world is absolutely nothing. Zero. NULL.

If you woulda, coulda, shoulda, then you didn’t.

I used to use these words all the time, especially when it came to meeting girls. I should have approached that girl at the coffee shop. I could have gotten that girl’s number.

This was the first time it occurred to me that my vocabulary was supporting my bad habits. I realized I was using words that were just euphemisms for cowardice, so I started replacing them with the truth: I didn’t approach that girl at the coffee shop. I didn’t get that girl’s number.

Phrasing it that way was pretty ego-bruising at first, so brutally honest that it made me feel stupid, but choosing words that kept me firmly rooted in reality cracked a necessary whip, and helped me break the bad habits of both chickening out and making excuses.

“I Really Like Her.”

Having spent a great deal of time learning about dating, sex, and relationships, and even more time out in the world getting blown out, rejected, and, therefore, laid, I’ve seen countless guys fall for girls they’ve just met. The moment you hear a guy say the words “I really like her” about a girl he just met, you know it’s going to get ugly.

If you are that guy, you meet girls, find yourself getting emotionally attached early on, and things often work out well, more power to you. For the other 99% of you, there is a better way. Instead of thinking “I really like her” about a girl you barely know, tell yourself the truth:

• I want to get to know her.
• So far, I think she’s pretty cool.
• I really want to fuck her.

Let’s face it: It takes at least a couple years to really get to know someone. Have you seen what she’s like when she’s drunk? Have you seen what she’s like around other guys? How does she act when the going gets rough? Will you guys still have a juicy sex life in six months from now? What about two years from now? How does she get on with your friends? How do you get on with hers? Is she a drama queen or does she bring positivity into your life?

People are complex. Most of us can’t even figure ourselves out, let alone other people. “I really like her”, when said of a girl you just met, is an unhealthy thought pattern that is a symptom of the scarcity mindset. When you get comfortable being genuine even in the face of social pressure, via social skydiving, you gain access to the same abundance with women that most women experience with men.

Even if you aren’t yet there in your head, let your words lead. If you’re doing this right, choosing words that accurately and precisely describe your reality, it should feel jarring and uncomfortable, even somewhat abrasive. Those are the kinds of feelings that inspire change. It’s easy to spend an entire afternoon “procrastinating”, but somewhat more difficult to spend an entire afternoon “destroying your life”, even though they’re the same thing, just said in different ways.

I’d encourage you to have fun exploring these ideas, to experiment with them, and to draw your own conclusions about their usefulness. You just might find yourself turning a “smoke break” into a “suicide break”, or a “Big Mac” into a “Heart Attack Burger”.