Fred gets home from work and sees a mess in the kitchen as he walks in.  He begins to make signs of frustration and soon proceeds to make comments to his wife about being more organized.  She brushes off the comment and continues to make dinner.  He then makes another comment when he sees some things thrown on the floor in the living room.  At this point his wife blows up, mentioning how he doesn’t appreciate her and only focuses on the negative.  Since he’s sure he’s right about the importance of being more organized, he stays strong on making his point and a big fight erupts, followed by the kids leaving the room as they don’t like hearing any of it.

Just a few days later when he arrives home, once again he feels the un-comfort when he sees things very disorganized, and once again makes a comment.  Surely enough this erupts into another fight.  After putting the kids to bed, Fred goes over to the study to get to some work he needed to take care of.  He ends up working pretty late and when he’s done he realizes his wife is asleep.  He goes over to kiss her goodnight and as he sees her asleep it hits him, “Why do I continue to make comments that I know will start fights, that I know will hurt her?”, he asks himself.  Fred makes it a point to change.  As he goes into deep thought he realizes it’s become a habit for him to focus on the negative when he arrives home instead of showing appreciation to his wife.  After much thought, he sets a reminder on his phone that will show up about the time he arrives home from work, it reads “show appreciation, don’t focus on the negative”.

As Fred’s arriving home the next day his reminder pops up.  He reads it when he arrives and stays focused on the message.  He follows through on showing his appreciation.  And as he’s laying in bed at the end of the day, he realizes what a great evening they had and commits to following this routine of reading his reminder, staying focused, and following through on the message, the message he set for himself.

So was Fred able to predict and change the future?  We are indeed creatures of habit.  Habits lead to predictable behavior and being able to predict behavior allows us to predict the future.  In Fred’s case, he predicted his own behavior, as silly as this might sound, by realizing the bad habit he had formed of focusing on the negative things when he arrives home from work, and in turn not showing his wife appreciation.  Fred’s brain had developed an autopilot course, a course that maybe started from the time he left his office to the time he started dinner or beyond.  This autopilot course was basically a collection of habits or a daily routine he had developed.  The good news is that it doesn’t take much to disrupt this course, but you do have to be conscious that it exists and you must have a need to change it.  In Fred’s case it was the reminder he set that disrupted the autopilot course.  The reminder took his brain out of autopilot.  Basically, the reminder was a trigger to change course.  Soon Fred will develop a new habit and no longer need a reminder.

Take a minute to think of what habit you have that you would like to change, and what triggers you can put in place to change them.