Over the next four months I want to lose at least ten kilos. The real key, though, doesn’t lie in the habit itself, but in the self-discipline you need to establish new patterns of behaviour in the first place. Out of your own will comes the goal, which demands self-discipline to build concrete routines – in my case, intermittent fasting of 12 to 16 hours to burn fat, combined with joint-friendly cycling. This is exactly the sequence Napoleon Hill describes with the Cosmic Habitforce in The Science of Personal Achievement: self-discipline is the tool for creating connections and anchoring new behaviours permanently in the subconscious.
Truth is, I still haven’t managed to get my weight under control for good. That means: establishing new habits is harder than you’d imagine. I had tried to sign up for health sports classes (Gesundheitssport) – I haven’t managed that for now. That’s why I think I simply have to set my own training plan for myself. And that’s why I’m deciding now that this very week I’ll inline skate at least three laps around Lake Cospuden (Cospudener See). That’s roughly 30 kilometres – that should be enough as a start for now, because the point is to establish new habits and not to launch some all-out crash effort that just fizzles out again.
Habits are essential, and habits have to be changed. The first step is to become aware of which habits you actually have. That means: one of the habits I have right now is eating late in the evening – and that’s a bad habit that only leads to negative results and consequences. And I have to re-establish the habit of moving regularly, and even more. I do reach the 150 cardio points the WHO sets almost every week, but that’s demonstrably just too little. I have to do more, I have to push myself harder, I have to bring my body and my pulse at least to a certain point and beyond, and I have to build muscle – all of that matters to me.
And that brings me back to Napoleon Hill, who gathered a great deal of knowledge on the “subconscious mind”: how important it is that we let the subconscious work for us in combination with the conscious mind. And that’s exactly what I’m going to do now. I’ve now decided to manage at least three laps around Lake Cospuden this week and then keep it going, to get back into the swing of things.
In keeping with this structural change, we’re also opening a new chapter on the technical side: thanks to our Ukrainian development team at Varti Studio, Thought entries can now be filtered by keywords and tags.
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