How to get into Second Life without really trying

Selby Evans is Thinkerer Melville in Second Life

Which is most important part of a salami sandwich?  The bread on top?  The meat in the middle?  The bread on the bottom?  You must choose one answer.

Sounds like a survey, doesn’t it.  Gives you a list of stupid answers and demands that you join the questioner in a kind of co-stupidity pact.  Worse yet, you know that the results will be out next month:

What’s wrong with our schools?  Eighty-five percent of us can’t answer a simple sandwich question.

No doubt you would be one of the majority that declined to pick a part that did not make a whole.  Leave off the slice on top and you get a handful of lettuce and salad dressing.  Leave off the slice on the bottom, and you have salami in your lap.  Leave off the salami and you wouldn’t know what kind of sandwich you had.

So what does a salami sandwich have to do with habits?  We are conjuring up a graphic image to mark out the three essential parts of a habit.  You can’t make a habit without these parts:

Top slice is the cue The cue is what triggers the habit.  There can be several cues.  It may take just one of the cues to trigger the action.  Or it may take a combination of cues working together. 

Usually, there will be external cues that you can use to anticipate when the habit is going to start running.  For example, the clock may signal you of lunch time.

Often the habit will also depend on internal cues.  If you are not hungry at lunch time, the clock may not get you to eat.

Meat in the middle is what you do.

Bottom slice is the payoff.  That’s what tells your brain to keep up the good work. The payoff doesn’t have to be big.  If you drive to work, the payoff is that you get where you intended to go.  You don’t have to like your work.  You don’t have to be using the best route.  The part of your brain that runs the habit does its job and leaves those things to management (your conscious attention).   

So you want to do something about a habit?  

Cue. Action.  Payoff. 

Got those figured out?  Then go do it. 

Otherwise, try some of the links to the right.

Manage your habits or your habits will manage you.

Topics: Memory

Tools: Memory
Your cue to remember.

Ungoals and the power of the insteads.

Habit Clipit

Nail-bite:  Changing a habit
Example

Strengths to use for habit control
Determined
Follow-Thru
Goal Setter, Good
Organized
Patient
Resourceful
Self-directing