My daughter is all of 9 months. Even as young as 6 months she would point out one of my bad habits, which I won’t dwell upon as I am not here to turn anyone off to this newsletter, but I bite my nails and my nail beds. It is not an incessant bite to the quick habit, but my cuticles can end up tender. When I feed my daughter a bottle she takes her tiny little fingers and digs her razor sharp fingernails into my tender cuticles.
Boy, am I in trouble or what? I can only imagine that this is the beginning of a lifelong relationship with Lennon where she knows me and my flaws better than I do myself. Where she sweetly, but very directly attempts to make me the best version of myself that can exist. I guess this is one of the possible daughter/father experiences and I have no choice but to be here for it. And I am, with an open heart and mind. If she can help me kick that habit, great!
Let’s talk about habits. So much has been written about habits that there is no reason to speak generally about them. Here are some resources I have read on habits if you want to take your own deeper dive.
My take on building good habits is it is hard. To be honest, I feel like I have to think about making a positive change in my life for years before I will actually do something about it. Take the two most important aspects of my morning routine: meditation and gratitude journaling. I thought about performing those activities regularly for years before I started doing them. And now, if they are not part of my morning, I feel incomplete.
I want to go back to a phrase I mentioned in a previous newsletter, “Down dog is a resting pose.” What this means to me is that we can gain energy while being in a beneficial and, for beginners, challenging yoga pose. Extrapolate this idea and apply to habitual activity and instead of feeling an energy drain from regularly updating your database or attending that monthly happy hour or cleaning bottles for the third time that day, you can gain energy for these activities. And I think it is this mindset that will make it easier to adopt good habits into your life.
I have shared a few personal anecdotes on good habit building that may provide encouragement for you to get off the fence and add a good habit into your life or workday routine. And yet, this newsletter started with a little story about bad habits. I think that the easiest way to replace a bad habit is with a good habit, so those bad habits are possibilities. And in that case, I have no choice but to thank my daughter instead of ignoring her stinging/non-verbal advice or worse asking her to stop pointing out my flaws because her doing so is uncomfortable for me.
As my bad habit is unconscious and happens a lot of times while I am engaged with others, I cannot stop what I am doing and do pushups or something like that. I can, though, think of the scene in the nursery chair feeding her and thinking about how she sweetly stares at me while pressing acutely on my flaws and remember that she is always with me, rooting me on to be the best person I can be. And then, when I am free to do so I can write a little haiku in her honor.
