Cultivating New Loops

Bringing awareness to the loops, habits, patterns in your life that aren’t working for you is excellent. Sometimes, awareness is all it takes to dissolve a problem.

Often, there’s more work to be done. And the more aware you are of the loops running your life, the clearer the solutions become.

But there’s one big problem: every loop in your life, no matter how toxic or destructive, serves an important purpose. It’s often our worst behaviors that are the most load bearing in our lives.

You can’t simply remove the bad habit and ride off into the sunset. You must also replace the toxic loop with something new.

This is a matter of deliberate cultivation.

Exercise

• Pick a toxic loop you want to replace in your life.
• What roles does this loop serve? What purpose does it fulfill?
• Note: you can write from scratch and also refer to your previous writing for these answers.
• Write about: what are possible things you can do to cultivate a new habit, a new behavior in your life? How can you replace the purpose the toxic loop serves in a more positive way?
• A good way to do this is to start a Themed Journal (next lesson).