Life operates through process

If you want a better life, learn to see your own processes. Your processes direct your life. They determine success. They determine happiness. They create all that is around you.

Most people equate this to behaviors. We can see many habits. We see our routines. We envision our life in this way.

But what if this also drives our thoughts? Our independent thought is not actually independent. It is based on thought patterns. It is based on thought processes.

In The Righteous Mind – Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, author Jonathan Haidt says, “Automatic processes run the human mind, just as they have been running animal minds for 500 million years, so they’re very good at what they do, like software that has been improved through thousands of product cycles.”

These automatic processes often go ignored. We use them. We create new processes. We derive new patterns. Because they are automatic, we ignore them.

When we stop and evaluate life, we can see that these automatic processes are very much in control. We assume we are independent. But we aren't. We still require processes to conduct life.

Once we accept this, we can start to use it to improve. If we are unhappy with our lot in life, we can do something about it. But we have to attack it in a new way.

We have to start to reprogram our mind. We have to change the processes. We can’t keep the same processes but expect a flash of insight to change anything. The processes overrule any sudden intuition.

This is why we can hear something that radically conflicts with our knowledge and NOT change. It doesn’t matter if it is true or not. All that matters is that our processes are set.

This is why we can go to a motivational seminar without improving. Give us 2 months and I’m certain we are almost exactly as we were before attending.

Read an inspirational book and feel that life is going to change? It probably won’t. Give it 6 months. Everything will go back to the way it was.

The way to change is not to expect a sudden change of heart. That is fleeting. It isn’t lasting. What is lasting is the process. The processes keep moving us forward.

So, if we feel out of control, it is because in many ways we are. These processes are in control. They keep us going.

To improve then, we have to be able to access the process. We have to see the process for what it is. Then we have to know how to change processes.

The secret to changing processes is that it isn’t about quantity or quality but is about consistency.

Want to start exercising and getting in shape? It doesn’t matter so much what you do and how well you do it. It doesn’t matter how much you do. Workout for 4 hours today? That isn’t actually what will determine success or failure.

What determines success and failure is how well you keep to the new pattern. Do you keep going with whatever pattern you create? Or does it revert back to your old processes.

Since consistency is so important, learn to focus on doing the same thing over and over. Since quality is less important, don’t try to be perfect. Just make sure you keep going.

Since quantity is less important, don’t make it harder than it has to be. Don’t rely on extreme effort today because you won’t have the motivation tomorrow so it will be more likely that you quit.

Instead, start small. Make it so easy that you keep doing it. Over and over and over. That will start to form a whole new pattern, a new process. Eventually you can grow the process to be higher quantity and elevated quality. But those are much less important in the long run than being able to reconstruct a process. And reconstructing processes is all about patterns and consistency.