Changing a habit, even if it's something that really matters to you, is not as easy as some people would have us believe.I'm sure you'll have found this out already.One reason is that our bodies have momentum. We settle into repeated patterns of action because of the way they make us feel. We're so used to being numbed or enlivened by our habits that the simple declaration "This habit and I are done with one another" is rarely sufficient.If you want to change a habit, you'll need to orient towards yourself with great kindness and great persistence.You'll need to practice, taking up new habits that orient the repeated patterns of your body in new directions.You'll need to commit to dusting yourself off each time you fall out of your cycle of practice, beginning again even if this happens many times.And, mostly, you'll need great patience.I loved this, from Peter Pruyn, paraphrasing Mark Twain:
An old habit is a lot like a cow stuck on the second floor landing: you can’t throw it out the bedroom window; you have to coax it down the stairs and out the front door... one step at a time.
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Because you're 
It's so easy to identify yourself with your circumstances, and to have your sense of your own possibility shaped by them.But it's important to remember that while you will always find yourself in, or subject to, particular circumstances, they are not you. They never were. They never will be.You are not your failure or your difficulty, your pain or your illness, your frustration or your longing, your debt or your confusion, your hopelessness or your fear or your certainty that you are stuck.And, equally, you are not your success. You are neither your status nor your privilege, your bank balance nor the string of letters after your name. You are not your fame, your salary, the size of your house, the number of 'likes' you have.Every time you think you are your circumstances, whether 'good' or 'bad', you diminish yourself.So who are you if you are not any of these?Can we ever find the words that will do justice to this question?For today, I think Khalil Gibran's response, from The Prophet, is a very good place to start:
I've been writing for a while about the necessity, for each of us, of turning towards our 
So much of what I've been writing about here over these past nine months has arisen from the work I do supporting people in their development in both their professional and personal lives.If you'd like to come and learn with me and my colleagues, and can be in London on Monday 3rd and Tuesday 4th February, we will be running our next session of Coaching to Excellence, a two-day introduction to coaching others in a pragmatic, compassionate and profoundly developmental way.It's also the foundation for a bigger programme that's a work of enormous love for us, our year-long Professional Coaching Course.
When someone is in difficulty, in a dark hole in their lives:Sympathy:
If you are still - really still - for a while, you might start to notice the stream of thought that runs below the surface of everything, a stream that seems to flow on and on even when you're not consciously thinking at all.Like most of us, perhaps you're so caught up in this stream that you hardly notice it. But all the time it's affecting you - ushering in particular moods, comparing you with others, making plans and undoing them again, judging, blaming, hoping, longing, musing, playing, working things out.This stream of thought is an expression of your relationship with yourself, with time, with life. Watching it attentively, so you can see what is really there, can be startling and liberating, because it's shaping so much of what you do and don't do, and what it feels like to be you.If you practice being still and watching this regularly enough and for long enough, you can gradually develop the capacity to see through your habitual patterns of thinking instead of being caught up in them. And when you're no longer bound so tightly by the horizons of an otherwise invisible current, the world gets just a little bigger.Such mindfulness is an important skill for each of us to cultivate, because often we put all our attention downstream, on our actions and their consequences, rather than upstream on what gives rise to them.And it's an important leadership skill, because if you don't know yourself well enough to see through what's shaping you, how can you expect to take responsibility for your actions, or understand others?
Why are we committed to going so fast, to doing so much without end?We, the people who have watches and clocks, but have apparently forgotten what it is to have time.