Want to see how hard changing certain habits or patterns of behaviour can be?

Do a simple experiment and change something about your morning routine.

The route you take when you walk or drive to work, the train carriage you always go to, the seat you sit in every morning (unless that stranger has arrogantly sat in YOUR seat before hand without your consent and forcing you to sit somewhere else anyway.)

Notice how resistant it feels. How much we want to ping back into place and do what feels natural because its what we’ve always done (or at least how it feels we have always done.)

But it was never a default place. We created it to make life easier, comfortable, convenient, and such like. That’s the only natural thing about it.

I started doing this experiment several months ago when I was commuting into the city by train. However several weeks in, on one particular Friday morning, I released I was creating the same patterns, just at another carriage.

What had started as ‘mixing it up’ had turned into just standing at what initially was a different place, but now was becoming where I’ve stood for the last few days.

I was lucky to catch the familiarity habit evolving and moved a few carriages down to keep the experiment going.

It’s also often hard to change what we are doing because our current patterns make so much sense.

They are usually logical.

The route to work is the shortest, the carriage we get on is nearer the exit gates, the coffee shop we go to serves the best coffee (we think anyway….. but how do we really know?)

We often don’t change because we see what we are doing as the best option. And we might be right. Change does not always mean better. Where we are is not always wrong.

For me the idea was not to expect better initially, but instead to explore and be looking for new paths that may lead somewhere new.

Do what we are always doing, usually gets us what we are currently getting.

We want change, but yet stay in the same circles, doing the same jobs, meeting the same people, socialising with the same friends, going to the same gym and at the same time etc.

We wonder why we don’t seem to ‘just bump into that stranger’ that happens to other people, the one that ‘recognises our greatness and offers us a position in their company that fast tracks us to the career of our dreams’.

Serendipity never happens to us. We never meet the love of our life on the train or at the convenience store.

But maybe that’s because we sit on the same carriage and go to the same store.

Lucky people are usually those who put them selves in positions that stand more of a chance of lady luck shining on them.

People who win competitions usually do lots of competitions!

How many times do we take a wrong turning only to pop out somewhere familiar, or where we want to be and say ‘oh, I didn’t realise this was here, that’s actually quicker!’.

This is what happened to me during this time. I took a different route to work every morning and discovered lots of different walkways that offered lots of different stimuli that I would have missed following the same route despite most routes taking longer than my normal walk in.

However, I also discovered the way I had walked for the last year was not the quickest. And not only did I discover a quicker route, the new way was also sheltered from the rain.

Now on rainy days I can walk in the dry or on the dry days I can take the longer route and enjoy the sunshine before the incarceration of the working day begins!

And I think that’s something to reflect on – that  change offers the possibility of discovery and that in turn gives us choices.

Obviously simply changing habits doesn’t ensure happy ever after or even getting what we want. Sometimes trying new things doesn’t work out.

The idea of doing this experiment is simply to show how programmed we are and to create a conscious awareness of where and how we are perhaps getting stuck now and in the future. It also offers us an opportunity to explore, to develop and to expand our experiences of people and places and all that they encapsulate.

Not only will we expand and develop our experiences, we will expand and develop ourselves.