Every day when I drive to up I take Winston Churchill to the QEW to Brant street to my office. Pretty straight forward and easy, right? However, it isn’t always the best route for me to take. Currently the Pan Am games are going on in the Greater Toronto Area and there have been temporary HOV lanes made on the highway. This has caused an already particularly bottled necked part of my drive to be even worse. Every night when I go to bed I think “tomorrow I will take a different way to work”. Then every morning I find myself turning onto Winston Churchill towards the highway. I almost immediately realize that I have done the thing I am used to doing and not the new thing I want to do. Then I find myself in an internal dialogue “do I turn around? Do I take the highway anyways? Do I try a different route?” UGH. And this is just a simple morning commute- something that doesn’t really have a huge impact or bearing on my life as a whole.
My point?
Imagine trying to change something major in your life, like a relationship with yourself or someone else. A bad habit. An emotional issue. It’s hard to change!! It is not impossible. But it is hard because we are habitual by nature and without work, introspection and effort we go the way we have always gone. So if you are making an effort to change something in your life- be patient, keep working at it, when you notice you have fallen back into old patterns instead of getting angry with yourself be glad that you noticed and use the opportunity to make a different choice or learn something new. And if you need help with it, don’t be ashamed, we all need help. My help is going to come in the form of sticky note on my steering wheel to remind me to change my route. Good luck and happy changing.
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