Stage 1

“It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.”
— G.K. Chesterton

Removing the Blinders

At the age of 72, Jim is a chronic complainer. I learned a long time ago that I don’t need to buy a newspaper or watch television to know what’s wrong with the world; there are plenty of people like Jim who will tell me what’s wrong. Complaining, gossiping, criticizing, and negative thinking are some of the deadliest habits.

Little by little, negativity eats away at a person’s health and eliminates the possibility for happiness. If someone close to you is a complainer, a criticizer, or a negative thinker, your own well-being is at risk.

Complaining about things beyond our direct control is one of the most destructive habits. Yes, I know, it’s also one of the most common things that people do. We complain about the weather; we talk about whoever is the focus of the latest celebrity scandal; we blame the government—any government—for everything that’s wrong.
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Stage 2

“We are not helpless dolls…we do not behave as we behave by accident.”
— Ernst G. Beier

Awareness—When You Know You Have a Problem

People in this stage know they have a problem and want to understand their problem, but they don’t know what to do or they feel powerless to change. People in stage 2 are still far from making a commitment to change.

Many people get stuck in this stage. They spend years telling themselves that they are going to change “one day.”

Fear of failure keeps many people stuck in this stage. They hide from the truth by telling themselves that they’re waiting for the “perfect” weight-loss program, the perfect smoking-cessation program, or the perfect time to stop drinking.

“I’ll change when the time is right,” is one of the phrases you hear most often from people in this stage of the self-change cycle. There will never be a “right time,” of course, but they haven’t been able to break out of their verbal cage.
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Stage 3

“Look straight ahead, and fix your eyes on what lies before you.”
— Proverbs 4:25

Planning Your Personal D-Day

We live in a world that is accustomed to 30-second commercials that offer instant solutions. But we shouldn’t be surprised when the easy solutions don’t work: There are no magic bullets, no simple solutions on the path to deep and lasting change.

In this stage, you work on making change your No. 1 priority. You can’t move into stage 4 until freeing yourself from the habit becomes your highest priority. Your life will go in the direction of your most dominant thoughts. When you focus on the past, your thoughts hold you back by causing you to relive events over and over.

Blaming ourselves for things that went wrong in the past is the most self-destructive habit of all. It’s easy for our families and friends to see when a habit like drinking, overeating, or overspending is destroying our lives. But it isn’t always so easy, not even for the people closest to us, to know when guilt and self-blame are destroying our possibility for happiness.
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Stage 4

“Change has to do with recognizing the value of options and with experiencing the fact that we are fully responsible for what we choose to do.”
— Ernst G. Beier

Attacking the Problem

In this stage you finally do it. But you need to remember that action isn’t the first or the last step in a change.

This is not the only stage where important changes happen. To get this far, you had to change your awareness, your emotions, and your self-image as you moved from each of the earlier stages to the next.

The goal in this stage is to change your way of thinking. You do this by:
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Stage 5

“There is no way to change one isolated item of behavior if the item is significant and the change is to be a lasting one. We have to change the pattern of which it is a part.”
— Ernst G. Beier

Winning the Battle

In this stage, the key is to replace your bad habit with a new lifestyle. Professional therapists call this stage maintenance.

Countering, the technique we studied in stage 4, is the first step in this process. Promoting new habits is crucial to your success. If you only remove the old habit, you’re condemned to a lifetime of fighting off the urge to go back.

People who get stuck in this stage would gladly go back to their old lifestyle if science were suddenly to offer new proof that their habit was harmless. If safe cigarettes were invented that somehow satisfied a smoker’s nicotine craving without causing cancer, emphysema, and heart disease, ex-smokers who never move past this stage would buy them by the truckload.
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Stage 6

“Anyone who learns that he can choose his own feelings and words and actions is a free person and a powerful person.”
— Ernst G. Beier

Free at Last!

In this stage, the key is to replace your bad habit with a new lifestyle. Professional therapists call this stage maintenance.

Countering, the technique we studied in stage 4, is the first step in this process. Promoting new habits is crucial to your success. If you only remove the old habit, you’re condemned to a lifetime of fighting off the urge to go back.

People who get stuck in this stage would gladly go back to their old lifestyle if science were suddenly to offer new proof that their habit was harmless. If safe cigarettes were invented that somehow satisfied a smoker’s nicotine craving without causing cancer, emphysema, and heart disease, ex-smokers who never move past this stage would buy them by the truckload.

In this stage you must struggle to prevent a relapse. As I mentioned in the last chapter, I wasn’t ready to quit smoking when I reached my target date. I thought I could just quit cold turkey and break the habit by using sheer willpower. I was wrong. My mistake didn’t cause me to give up, as often happens when people discover that willpower alone isn’t enough.
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Free at Last!

When you move from stage 5 to stage 6, you’ve broken the habit forever. In this stage the bad habit is no longer a threat. It will never return.

Professional therapists call this stage termination. Some therapists believe that termination is impossible. Alcoholics Anonymous teaches its members that they can never be free of the threat of a relapse. In other words, the best they can hope for is a lifetime of successful maintenance, which means that they can expect to spend the rest of their lives fighting the urge to have a drink.

There is a better way: I know that termination is possible, because I was as addicted to nicotine as alcoholics are to alcohol, and I freed myself from cigarettes forever.

Our potential for change

I don’t want to make it sound easy, because it isn’t. But it is possible to break bad habits forever.

We tend to get the results that we expect to get. A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine reported some interesting findings on the attitudes and expectations of cancer patients.
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