The recipe:

1. Stop doing the old thing
2. Start doing the new thing
3. Celebrate

Easy, right?

The prevailing wisdom on shifting habits centers around being slow and steady. Consistency and patience are key. If you try to dive in too fast, or too hard, failure is guaranteed. This applies to everything from losing weight, taking up meditation and learning how to tango.

I say, bullocks. Sure, the journey to mastering a new behavior or skill takes place over time. The shift in identity, however, from fat to fit, or non-dancer to dancer, actually happens in the consciousness in an immeasurably small instant. A proverbial snap of the fingers.

Change happens over time, but transformation happens instantaneously. From smoker to non-smoker, from angry to compassionate, from lying to honest. All spiritual before they are mental before they are physical. The first two happen too quickly to be measured on our time scales.

That’s both the good news and the bad news. We can throw away the excuses of things being too hard (and taking too long), but the actual mechanism of turning on that light, or sparking that flame, can be quite tricky. It’s not a matter of falsely proclaiming affirmations (“I am good enough, smart enough and people like me,” courtesy of Stuart Smalley) but in seeing something that we had not seen before.

The most poignant examples in my life include:

• The moment I realized the anger-filled words coming out of my daughter’s mouth were actually my words. Well, not originally. First, they had been my mother’s words.

• The moment I saw myself willingly crawl back into the black hole of sadness because the voice in my head told me it was safer there.

• My best friend’s stern words about the relationship story I kept repeating.

• My own teachings about the hell we create for ourselves echoing in my head as I sat in paradise, stewing over some inconsequential slight.

These were not slow awarenesses, like a sunrise. They were jolts that felt like the end of a blackout, when all the lights, TV’s and appliances turn themselves on at once.  Those realizations were more powerful (and jarring) than a zap of lightning.

And we’ve all had them. Unfortunately, they too often get buried by the ego mind and the rational mind conspiring to declare these insights inconsequential.

These flashes of cognizance couldn’t be more important, and clearly explain why taking on something new, like meditation or journaling, only catches on after the 479^th attempt. Before that, the consciousness shift, which must always precede the behavioral shift, was missing.

Notice those aha’s. Give them space to develop into fully formed ideas and visions. Don’t let those miraculous gifts be left to dissipate and disappear. Harness their power, because they can truly change your life.

Slogging away, with all the willpower and determination you can muster, is no way to live a life, I say. I’d much rather just snap my fingers into new thinking, new acting and new being.

And you? What’s only a snap away from shifting in your life? Tell me below.

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