How to Change Your Default Thinking Habits and Transform Life

When you are trying to change a default thinking habit or behaviour, it is like learning to drive on the other side of the road. It’s hard work.

Whether you drive on the left or the right, changing your thinking is difficult. It must be very frightening for foreign drivers used to driving on the right-hand side of the road coming to places such as New Zealand and having to adjust to driving on the left.

I remember following a typical white tourist camper van once. As it came up to a roundabout, it turned right instead of left. I wondered where on earth it was going, as I then saw it on the other side of the intersection.

Why Changing a Default Thinking Habit Feels So Hard

When you have driven on one side of the road all your life, it becomes a deeply ingrained habit — so deep that it takes moment-by-moment concentration and effort to make sure you don’t revert to old patterns. It’s a default thinking habit.

When you are trying to change a thinking habit or behaviour, it is like learning to drive on the other side of the road.

Addicts find it incredibly difficult to change because they need to oppose every pull of thinking and feeling that would have them slip back into the old rut. But it isn’t just those with addiction issues who find it difficult to change — we all do.

Often we don’t change because it’s too difficult, and too much effort is required. We won’t try to change until we’re fully convinced that the current pattern of thinking and behaving is dangerous. Even then, it is so easy to slip across the median line and into real danger.

Seven Steps to Change Your Default Thinking Patterns

1. Pray

Ask God for the help you need to change. Ask for awareness of when you are slipping back into old habits. Ask for help to lasso those varmint thoughts.

2. Identify the Dangers

Be very clear about the dangers of continuing in this pattern of thinking and behaving. If you always do what you have always done, you will always get what you have always got. Write out the consequences for you, and for others, if you keep doing what you’ve always done.

3. Have a Compelling Vision

What do you hope to achieve through a new way of thinking and behaving? What do you desire from the change? Does it excite you?

4. Create Cognitive Reminders

This might be a notebook of new thinking habits, verses of scripture, an encouragement journal, or a scrapbook of pictures of the potential new you.

5. Oppose Your Old Thought Patterns With New Insights

Your old thinking patterns and self-talk are “stinky thinky” and need to be replaced with new thoughts and phrases — for example: “My past does not define me; it is the decisions I make today that define me.”

6. Oppose Your Feelings

Feelings are often repeating echoes of past experiences and don’t truly represent current reality. We need, at times, to discount our feelings before they discount us.

In order to oppose the influence and direction of one’s old feelings, a rational mind first needs a very good reason. Without truth to reassure, change isn’t possible. — D. Riddell

7. Get a Coach

I don’t think anybody likes to be corrected or challenged, especially by backseat drivers! But so often we need others beside us, reminding us to keep on the right side. It may be a friend, a family member, or a counsellor — someone who can give encouragement and praise, sprinkled lightly with correction and warning.

People change when they hurt enough that they have to,
learn enough that they want to,
or receive enough that they are able to.

— John Maxwell

Questions to Consider

Where do you seriously need to change your thinking and behaviour tracks?
What qualities are needed in the people who can coach you through change?

Seven Steps to Change your Default Thinking Patterns