How Habits Can Hurt Us

Last month, I started a yoga immersion with my teacher, Aarti. A big part of the immersion is figuring out what our daily schedules should be, and forming the necessary habits to make them stick.

My hope is that by the end of the 6-month immersion, I have formed some positive morning and bedtime habits. Right now, my days vary wildly, and my sleep schedule is hurting as a result. From that consequence comes a cascade of others - I’m not using my time wisely, meaning my work time cuts into my wind-down time, and so on. It’s true that forming good morning and evening habits can shape the rest of your day, setting the tone and creating necessary boundaries.

Aarti compared building a habit to sledding down a hill in fresh snow.

The first time takes a lot of effort and pushing - you’re forging a new path, after all. However, after just a few rounds, the activity becomes more efficient. You find yourself zooming down the hill in no time.

But what happens when we are stuck in bad habits? What about bad habits when it comes to business?

Taking my teacher’s metaphor further, I kept thinking about what would happen if we formed a bad habit, seeing that it’s as automatic as a good one. Imagine a hill that’s gotten so smooth and icy that the zoom on your way down puts you in danger of hitting a tree. What do you do next?

“This is the way we’ve always done it.”

The way I see people get stuck in the way “we’ve always done things” really reminds me of what it would look like to be careening down a hill, out of control, wondering what you can do to fix it…not looking a few feet to either side of you to see fresh, untouched snow that offers a new start.

This kind of conversation is likely familiar to most of us. Such ideas aren’t unique to any one industry. For the sake of painting a clear picture, I’m going to use two examples I’ve seen recently, but I’d love to continue the conversation in the comments and DMs.

“What is the better model? I honestly haven’t seen any viable alternatives.”

Recently, a person who holds a lot of power in the theatre world discussed the reasons attendance was down and sales were poor. Their original post included 7 potential reasons - extended closures, scaled-back programming, higher ticket prices, a shift in audience preferences, cost increases, no new ideas to combat “problematic producing models,” and a drop in metropolitan audiences.

When one commenter replied by highlighting the problems caused by failure to adapt to new audiences and understand new ways of funding the arts, the response was a shoulder shrug: “…we’ve been hearing that for decades. What is the better model? I honestly haven’t seen any viable alternatives.”

A person who is presumably in charge of revenue, budgets, business models, and attracting audiences is questioning whether any other alternatives are viable, despite the inevitable tree-splat that is about to happen (and they’ve definitely already been whacked by some branches along the way).

If we can’t expect people in leadership roles to lead the charge and envision a new way of working, what CAN we expect?

Publish or Perish and the Funding Conundrum

This next example is even more personal.

I promise I’ll talk more about my thesis in the months to come, but in a nutshell, I’m getting an MS in nutrition and focusing on the cultural aspects of food and nutrition that often get overlooked. Worse than that, they’re frequently undervalued by organizations that dole out funding.

Large organizations responsible for ensuring the health and nutritional needs of the population want to see changes in waist circumference, lower blood pressure values, and changes in BMI - outcomes that are presumably easy to measure. Encouraging people to engage in nutritional practices that connect them to their cultural roots doesn’t have as snappy and valuable of an outcome, unless it’s paired with measurable biomedical changes, too. However, I would argue (and I AM arguing, along with some community orgs), that it’s just as important, if not far more important.

In a seminar presentation last semester, my advisor asked me how I would look to secure funding or assert the value of my work to the university and outside organizations.

In my response, I cited Kelley Nicole Palmer as someone who didn’t just take the “way we’ve always done things” to be the end of the discussion.

When I met Palmer, she was a guest mentor and teacher in my yoga teacher training. During her time with us, she talked about Sanctuary in the City, the organization she co-founded. At the time, Sanctuary in the City offered free yoga classes to Black community members, paid her teachers $100/hr, and achieved this through reimagining what the economic model can look like.

After revisiting Palmer’s work and websites a couple of years later, I was struck by a few things.

On Sanctuary in the City’s site, they say “The solutions we seek do not exist.” While the offerings have shifted a bit, the general goal is the same - remove cost as a barrier and offer care where it is most needed.

Palmer is now embarking on a new project - Unshackled Alchemy, a village-building endeavor that, according to their website, will be an “Afro-Futurist community focused on Radical imagination and deep visioning of what a Black Joyfull, Interconnected, Liberated, community could look like, feel like, taste like.”

“The solutions we seek do not exist”

Most academics and business professionals throw up their hands the moment they are faced with imagining a solution that doesn’t exist. This is natural and human! They are being asked to counter a well-established habit, and that requires a lot of effort and just as much imagination.

I have to say, as someone who is working their way “up” (whatever up is), it’s super disappointing to see people in positions of power act as if they have no control or influence over systems they could choose to actively work on changing. “The solutions we seek do not exist.” Looking around for other viable solutions isn’t the way. We have to create brand-new ones.

My plan is to move forward with my project with the assertion that it is inherently valuable, because I know it has been valuable for the community members that practice and promote it. Along the way, I believe I will uncover or cobble together solutions that work to promote these important ideas. Accepting the status quo is not an option for me. I’ll push through that snow until it becomes smooth and automatic, like we can’t imagine life without it. Wasn’t this always deemed valuable? Didn’t we always fund projects like these?

Literally all economic models, all ways of doing business, all modes of thinking and valuing ideas, came from somewhere. They started out as undriven snow.

What can you do to work on starting a new habit and breaking an old one today? What things that have always been done can be undone by you in the months and years to come?