Self Talk and Positive Thinking.com

An important habit that you can develop is the habit of thinking before acting. Often, when we are pressured from all sides with decisions that have to be made, we leap to conclusions and make decisions without carefully considering all the possible ramifications of those decisions. Instead, develop the habit of buying time between the pressure to make a decision, and the actual decision itself. There is a rule that says, “If the decision does not have to be made now, it has to not be made now.” Your mind is incredibly powerful, and never more so than when you give it time to reflect upon a decision before you make the decision in the first place. Make it a habit of asking for a day, or a weekend, or even a week or a month, before you make a final decision. Put it off as long as possible. The very act of allowing the various pieces of information to settle in your brain will enable you to make a much better decision later on than you might have made if you decided too  quickly.
It is amazing how many people say, “If I had just thought about that for a little while, I would have made a completely different decision.” This is almost always the case. Make it a habit to delay and defer decisions as long as you possibly can. They will invariably be better decisions when you finally come around to making them.

“Thoughts lead on to purposes; purposes go forth in action; actions form habits; habits decide character; and character fixes our destiny.” (Tryon Edwards)

Almost everything you are or will be will be determined by your thoughts, feelings and behaviors. Fully 95% of everything you think, feel and do will be determined by your habits. The key to becoming a great person, and living a great life, is for you to develop the habits of success that lead inevitably to your achieving everything that is possible for you. Fortunately, all habits are learned, and are therefore learnable. If you have bad habits, or if you have not yet developed the habits that you need to become everything that you are capable of becoming, you can develop these habits by a systematic process of practice and repetition, just as you learn any other subject. Good habits are hard to learn, but easy to live with. Bad habits, on the other hand,are easy to learn but hard to live with. In either case, once you have developed a habit, it becomes automatic and easy. Like breathing in and breathing out, you find it easier and easier to engage in thoughts, feelings and behaviors that are consistent with the person you want to be, and the goals you want to achieve.
A habit has been defined as “a conditioned response to stimuli,” but where do they originate? A habit is developed as the result of your responding in a particular way to a particular stimulus, often starting early in life. It is very much like driving down the road and taking a fork in one direction or another. Whichever direction you go, good or bad, largely determines where you end up. Fortunately, you are born with no habits at all. You have acquired them all from infancy. Different habits take different time periods to develop, if you desire them, or to overcome, if they are habits that you want to get rid of. As it happens, there is a proven system that you can use to accelerate the process of new habit pattern development. Behavioral psychologists refer to “operant conditioning” to describe how people learn certain automatic behaviors. They sometimes refer to the “SBC Model” of new habit pattern formation. These three letters stand for “Stimulus-Behavior- Consequences.” First, something happens in your life that stimulates a thought or feeling. Second, in response, you behave a particular way. Third, as a result, you experience a certain consequence. If you repeat this process often enough, you develop a new habit. In Pavlov’s experiments with dogs, one of the first major experiments on the role of operant conditioning, a hungry dog was given a piece of meat and a bell was rung at the same time. This process was repeated several times, over several days. Each time the dog received the meat, the dog would salivate in anticipation of the food, and the bell would ring. After repeating this stimulus-response action several times, the dog would salivate automatically upon hearing the bell, even when no meat was present. In the same way, you can develop conditioned responses to people and situations as the result of previous experiences, either positive or negative. For example, if there is someone in your life that you love and care about, the thought of that person, or the sound of that person on the phone, will immediately cause you to smile and feel happy.
If there is a person in your life, usually from your past, who has hurt you, and made you angry or unhappy, the very thought of that person, or even the person’s name, will immediately trigger feelings of anger or sadness. Many people become trapped by memories of unhappy experiences, which have become habitual responses, and are often unable to let them go.
There is another model of habit pattern development called the “ABC Model.” These three letters stand for antecedents-behaviors-consequences. What psychologists have discovered is that the antecedents, what has happened in the past, stimulate only 15% of your behaviors. Fully 85% of your behaviors are motivated by what you expect to happen in the future, by the anticipated consequences. For example, if you are preparing to give a presentation, or apply for a job, 85% of your motivation will be determined by what you expect to happen if you are successful. Only 15% of your motivation will be decided by what you have done in the past in similar circumstances.  People are motivated to act in a particular way by what they expect to happen more than any other factor or influence. In other words, you do the things you do because of the consequences you feel you will experience as a result. Expectations Theory explains small things, like what you do and say in a social situation, and large matters, such as capital movements in the international financial markets.  You can actually manufacture your own expectations. You can develop the habit of expecting good things to happen, no matter how they may appear at the moment. Your expectations then influence your attitudes and the way you treat other people. Your attitudes, expectations and behaviors will then have an inordinate influence on the way things actually work out. In effect, you can control much of your own future by expecting things to happen in a positive way. Unfortunately, negative expectations also become self-fulfilling prophecies. If you expect something to turn out poorly, this will affect your attitude and behavior. Your negative attitude then increases the likelihood that you will experience the negative consequences that you anticipated. If you repeat this often enough, you will develop a negative and pessimistic attitude. This way of thinking will become a habit.