We are often told that changing our lives begins with changing our habits. And sometimes it does. But what happens when the new routine works for a while and the old way of moving through life quietly returns?
In this edition of The Aligned Journal, we explore the difference between changing what we do and changing how we inhabit our lives—and why the patterns we most want to leave behind may deserve curiosity before they deserve another strategy.
There is something strangely hopeful about a new notebook.
I have bought enough of them over the years to recognize the feeling: those first clean pages seem to suggest that whatever has been scattered might finally become orderly. Nothing has been crossed out yet. There are no abandoned lists, no arrows squeezed into margins, no tasks carried from Monday to Tuesday to Wednesday with increasing amounts of guilt attached to them. Everything still fits neatly on the page, including, for a little while, the life I imagine I am about to live.
Sometimes the notebook becomes part of a larger reset. I decide I am going to be more intentional about my mornings, meditate before looking at email, move my body, drink more water, read instead of scrolling, and leave more space between appointments. I remind myself not to turn every interesting idea into another project. Having spent much of my life thinking about human growth, I know enough not to attempt all of this at once, so I choose a few things that matter and begin again.
And often, they help. Some even stay. What interests me is what happens next.
I can meditate in the morning and still rush through the afternoon, or block out time for reflection only to spend part of it thinking about what I should be doing next. I can take a walk while composing an email in my head, which is a rather efficient way of being outside without actually being there. And I have become quite capable of creating room on my calendar without necessarily creating much room in myself.
For a long time, I thought this meant I needed to get better at the habits. Lately, I have begun to wonder whether I was asking the habits to do something they were never capable of doing.
The promise of starting over
Most of us know some version of this ritual. January is particularly good at it, but birthdays work too, as do Mondays, the beginning of a month, the return from vacation, or the evening when our phone reports how much of the previous week we apparently spent staring at it.
Something needs to change, we decide, and there is usually plenty of evidence to support the conclusion. We start walking in the morning, delete an app, promise to stop checking email after dinner, buy healthier food, begin journaling, or decide we will no longer say yes immediately when someone asks us for something. For a while, there is a satisfying sense of movement. We are not simply hoping life will be different; we are doing something about it.
Then life resumes being life.
The morning gets crowded. Someone needs something. We travel. We get tired. The phone finds its way back to the nightstand, and the boundary that seemed perfectly reasonable when we wrote it in our journal becomes considerably more complicated when someone we care about is standing on the other side of it.
When the new behavior begins to disappear, we usually know where to place the blame. We tell ourselves that we need more discipline, greater consistency, or a better system. Perhaps we started too ambitiously. Perhaps we need to make the habit smaller. There is no shortage of advice available, and some of it is quite good.
Habits do matter. Repetition matters. A life is partly shaped by the ordinary things we do again and again, and I have practices in my own life that I would not willingly give up. But I think we sometimes confuse changing a habit with changing a life. They overlap, certainly, but they are not quite the same thing.
I have become especially aware of the difference because some of the habits I once imagined would make me less hurried are now well established. I meditate. I walk. I read and reflect. I have a garden built partly as a place for walking meditation. I have spent years studying awareness and growth and what allows human beings to change, and I can still become remarkably busy.
There is something humbling about becoming fairly good at meditation and discovering that you can also become fairly good at being a busy person who meditates.
The life that comes with you
Vacations have taught me something similar.
There have been times when Al and I have gone away and almost everything I claim to need in order to slow down has finally been provided. The calendar is mostly empty. There are no meetings to attend and no appointments waiting later in the day. We might be sitting somewhere beautiful with nowhere in particular to go, which should theoretically solve the problem.
Then I discover that while I have successfully transported my body hundreds of miles from home, my mind apparently booked the same trip.
The project comes with me, along with the conversation I haven’t had, the email I should probably send, the idea I don’t want to forget, and that persistent feeling that I ought to be using some of this wonderful free time well. I have escaped the calendar without escaping the part of me that knows how to fill one.
I don’t think this is unusual. We can put the phone in another room and spend twenty minutes wondering whether someone has responded. We can schedule an afternoon off and feel vaguely irresponsible for having it. We can say no to a request and then spend the evening constructing explanations for why we were justified in saying no. We can sit perfectly still while remaining internally in motion.
In each case, something visible has changed while something less visible has come along for the ride. That distinction interests me because it changes the question. Instead of asking only, How do I stop doing this?, I find myself wondering, Why does doing this make so much sense to me?
When an old habit is doing its job
Imagine someone who has decided she needs better boundaries. Her calendar confirms it. She is overcommitted, tired of being overcommitted, and fully aware that saying yes to everything is part of the problem. She may have read books about boundaries and underlined all the appropriate passages.
Then someone asks for her help. Before she quite knows what has happened, she hears herself saying, “Sure.”
It would be easy to conclude that she has a boundary problem, and at one level she does. But perhaps saying yes has been doing something important for her for a very long time. Maybe being dependable is part of how she knows she matters, or being needed has become so closely associated with being valued that separating the two feels almost impossible. Perhaps disappointing someone feels more threatening than exhaustion does.
If that is true, learning to say no is no longer merely a communication skill. Somewhere beneath the word is a more vulnerable question: Will I still belong if I disappoint someone?
I see a similar pattern in leadership. A leader knows he needs to delegate more, understands all the reasons why, and genuinely wants the people around him to grow. Yet when something important begins to wobble, he steps in and takes over. We could give him another delegation strategy, but perhaps solving problems is one of the ways he has learned to recognize his own value. If he is no longer the person everyone turns to for the answer, he may eventually have to encounter a question no leadership technique can answer for him: Then what am I here for?
Seen this way, some of our most frustrating patterns are not irrational at all. They may be doing exactly what they learned to do, even if what they provide is no longer worth what they cost.
That possibility invites a different kind of attention. Instead of immediately trying to eliminate a behavior, we can become curious about what it has been giving us: safety, perhaps, or belonging, recognition, certainty, usefulness, control. Sometimes the behavior making our life smaller today began as a perfectly reasonable way of moving through the world years ago.
Understanding that does not mean we have to keep it. It simply means we stop treating ourselves as the enemy.
When the habit is something everyone admires
This becomes even harder when the pattern we need to examine is something other people value in us. Being helpful. Being responsible. Working hard. Being available. Keeping our word. Getting things done.
These are qualities I value in myself, and much of my life has been built around them. I taught, led, consulted, facilitated, coached, served, volunteered, and created things. When there was something meaningful to be done, my instinct was usually to move toward it, and that instinct has given me a rich life filled with work and relationships for which I am deeply grateful.
It can also fill a life rather quickly.
Perhaps one of the harder truths about change is that sometimes the thing asking for our attention is not a weakness at all. It is a strength that no longer knows when to sit down.
I remember sitting in meditation one evening after what had been, by any reasonable measure, a good day. I had done meaningful work, made progress on things that mattered, helped people, and completed much of what I had intended to complete. There was no crisis and nothing obvious to fix.
Yet as the activity of the day began to settle, I became aware of how little of it I had actually inhabited. My competence had been there. My usefulness had been there. The part of me that knows how to accomplish things had performed beautifully, and yet I had somehow moved through much of the day without being fully present to the life in which all that accomplishment was happening.
That realization has stayed with me because it could not be solved by adding meditation to my routine. I was already meditating. The question had moved somewhere else.
What are we actually trying to change?
Maybe this is why certain changes resist us. We say we want to work less when what we may really want is to loosen the connection between accomplishment and worth. We say we need better boundaries when what we may actually be learning is that a relationship can survive our honesty. We say we want to stop checking the phone when part of what we long for is freedom from the feeling that we must always know what is happening somewhere else.
And when we say we want to slow down, perhaps what we are really asking is whether we can trust ourselves to remain valuable when we are not constantly moving.
Those are different questions.
They are less about behavior than relationship: our relationship with work, approval, uncertainty, rest, other people, and ourselves. Relationships do not usually change because we announce a new rule. They change through experience, often in moments so ordinary that we barely notice them.
- You say no to something and the person doesn’t leave.
- You let someone else solve the problem and discover that it gets solved, although perhaps not exactly as you would have solved it.
- You leave an afternoon empty and the world continues without requiring an emergency meeting.
- You put the phone down during dinner and eventually stop wondering where it is.
None of these moments is particularly dramatic, but each offers a small piece of evidence that the old story may not be entirely true. Perhaps I can disappoint someone and still be loved. Perhaps I can be useful without being indispensable. Perhaps rest does not have to be earned. Perhaps I can leave something unfinished and still sleep.
Over time, those experiences accumulate. The behavior begins to change, but now it is following something deeper.
What the garden has been trying to teach me
I probably should have understood this sooner from the garden.
Years ago, I began clearing a wooded part of our property. Over time, what started as outdoor work became the Mind Garden, with paths and circles, pollinator beds, places to sit, and spaces I now use for walking meditation. I have spent countless hours there planting, moving, cutting, pruning, watering, clearing, and occasionally discovering that the plant I was certain would thrive in one place had opinions of its own.
For all that work, I have never actually made anything grow. I can improve the soil, pay attention to sunlight, move a struggling plant, provide water, remove what is crowding it, and give it room. Then something happens that is not mine to command.
Growth occurs.
This seems obvious when I am standing in the garden and considerably less obvious when I am thinking about my own life. With ourselves, we are tempted to pull on the stem. We want evidence that the morning walk is working, that meditation is changing us, that the boundary is making us stronger, that the new routine is finally producing the person we intended to become. We count the days and measure the progress because behavior is visible and therefore reassuring.
But perhaps the walk matters partly because one morning we finally notice the sky. Perhaps meditation matters because one evening it becomes quiet enough to recognize that we have been absent from a life we actually love. Perhaps the boundary becomes meaningful not when we successfully say no, but when we discover afterward that we can say no and still belong.
The habit matters, but perhaps not for the reason we first imagined. The walk, the meditation, the boundary, the afternoon we finally leave empty may matter because each creates a small opening in which we can experience ourselves differently. Over time, those experiences may begin changing something that a checklist never could.
Tomorrow morning
Tomorrow morning will probably look a great deal like this morning. There will be water and tea, something to read, some quiet, meditation, and the ordinary rituals with which I have learned to begin a day. I am not planning to replace them, and there is no new notebook waiting on the table.
What interests me now is not whether I can perform the routine more faithfully, but how I am arriving inside it. I can meditate as one more thing to complete before the real day begins, or I can actually be there. I can read because I love learning, or quietly turn another book into evidence that I am making progress. I can create space on a calendar while continuing to carry urgency into every open hour.
I doubt I need to ask myself those questions every morning. They would quickly become another routine, and I am quite capable of turning almost anything into one.
Maybe tomorrow the tea can simply be tea.
Maybe the chair can simply be a place to sit for a while before the day begins.
Outside, the garden will continue doing what gardens do, much of it without my assistance. Something will need pruning. Something else will need water. Somewhere, almost certainly, something I did not plant will be growing.
I can decide later what to do about it.
For now, I might just notice what is there.
Reflection Question
What is one pattern you keep trying to change—and what might that pattern be giving you that you haven’t fully noticed?
Perhaps it offers a sense of safety, usefulness, belonging, control, certainty, approval, or simply something familiar. You don’t need to solve it. Just notice what becomes visible when you stop asking, “Why do I keep doing this?” and begin asking, “Why might this make sense?”
A Five-Minute Practice: Before You Change the Habit
Choose one recurring habit or pattern—not the biggest problem in your life, just something familiar that you have tried to change more than once.
For the first minute, name the behavior without judging it: “I notice that I…”
For the next two minutes, write whatever comes after this question: “When I do this, what does it give me?” You might notice something obvious, or something less expected: relief, connection, a sense of accomplishment, reassurance, control, usefulness, escape.
For the final two minutes, consider one more question: “What else might give me some of what I’m actually looking for?”
Don’t make a plan. Don’t create another habit to track tomorrow morning.
Just notice.
Sometimes change begins not when we finally become disciplined enough to overcome ourselves, but when we understand ourselves well enough to stop fighting the wrong thing.
Continue the Conversation
Thank you for spending a little time here.
If this conversation reminded you of someone who may need it, I hope you’ll share it with them. And if it stirred a question that continues to stay with you, I’d love to hear it.
Some of my favorite conversations begin after the writing ends.
— Michael
If you’re navigating your own season of transition and would like a structured place to explore what’s next, learn more about Executive Coaching or begin with the RISE UP Assessment.
Questions Readers Often Ask
Why do I keep falling back into old habits? Old habits are often connected to familiar contexts, cues, identities, and emotional needs. A new routine may change the visible behavior for a time while the conditions supporting the older pattern remain. When a pattern keeps returning, it can be useful to ask not only how to stop it, but what the pattern has been doing for you.
Why don’t good habits always create lasting change? Good habits can improve health, attention, relationships, and daily life, but behavior is only one part of change. A person can adopt a healthier routine while carrying the same urgency, self-expectations, fears, or assumptions into it. Lasting change may involve both repeated behavior and a changing relationship with the beliefs and identity beneath it.
Is willpower the reason habits fail? Not necessarily. Motivation and willpower vary, and behavior is also shaped by context, environment, repetition, rewards, and identity. If a habit repeatedly disappears, treating the setback only as a discipline problem may miss important information about what makes the old behavior easy or meaningful.
What does identity have to do with habits? The way we understand ourselves can make some behaviors feel natural and others feel like something we must continually force. As new experiences begin to change what we believe about ourselves—for example, discovering that we can say no and still belong—the behavior may become easier to sustain.
How do I create change that lasts? Begin with the behavior, but stay curious about what surrounds it. Notice the situations that trigger the old pattern, what the behavior gives you, what you fear might happen if you respond differently, and what small experiences could offer new evidence. Sustainable change is often less about overpowering yourself and more about creating conditions in which a different response can become possible.
Stay Connected
If these reflections resonate with you, stay connected with Michael and Spirit Rising Coaching.
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