What Habit Blows Up Your Goals?

I’m going to let you in on a secret that I have kept for many years because I didn’t want to embarrass myself. But now that I have kicked the habit I will let you in on it.

I was an addict

My drug?

TV

Not an all day habit, but about 10 programs that I simply could not miss watching every week. I looked forward to the evenings when I could just become supine on the couch, get all the business, home and family slurry out of my mind and slide into Zombie land. I even had a favorite daytime soap that I had followed for 30 years! OK, so now it’s eleven programs. Complete honesty for us addicts, right?

I even taped them when I absolutely had to be away from home, but I usually scheduled my life so I didn’t have to be away (cringe). Then I could usually not find the time to watch the tape in between all my other programs!

I did a bit of math one day. Fifteen hours of TV each week (10 programs + 5 daily soap episodes) means sixty hours a month! Good grief, that more than an entire work week! I was in total shock exposing the fact that I spent that much time in mindless slop.

I got to thinking how much of those sixty hours per month were actual program and how much were commercials and breaks? It came out to nearly twenty hours per month were spent in commercial limbo. I hate commercials! And here I was spending twenty hours a month doing something I despise. Amazing how you put up with 30 seconds here and 60 seconds there of something you don’t like to do not realizing how those seconds morph into a chunk your life.

Now I turned the calculator into a smokin’ frenzie figuring out what I could accomplish in my business if I directed those sixty hours a month into income ventures. I had always said I was going to write a book, but never got around to it. A prime example of setting a goal and never taking an action step toward it. So it really wasn’t a goal it was a wanna. Sometimes we have to be tapped, sometimes we have to be slapped and sometimes we need a board between the eyes. This was my ’board’.

That plus a trip to Kathmandu, Nepal as a volunteer English teacher to Buddhist monks for six weeks where there was no English TV let alone an episode of Desperate Housewives. I had been arranging this trip for almost a year simply because I had felt called to do it plus it was an adventure. I didn’t have even a twinkling inkling how it would change my entire life!

I arrive home after the six weeks and find I have no interest in TV! I had missed all the season’s finale shows, was told by others how they all ended, shrugged and re-arranged my life into taking my business into a new direction, one without the boob-tube.

As of May first of this year 2010 I will have completed one full year of no TV and wrote my book, got a publisher, had it edited, had the cover and interior art done and it has just gone to print. I will have it in my hands by the end of April. How ironic the timing is with my May 1st TV-less anniversary. But then, there are no coincidences.

After calculating all the wasted hours in just a month I dare not go for a year or years. I’m afraid the shock would stop my heart. I’m embarrassed enough! But, I am telling you this because we all have habits that are keeping our goals at a distance. Often we are not even aware of them.

I’m suggesting that you do some soul searching and be brutally honest with yourself. Lying to you is a self defeating game, so don’t do it. When you have faced the real truth and acknowledged it, then you have the power to change it.

The next step is to find out what this habit is really costing you especially in time or money or healthy relationships, personally and professionally. Get out that calculator and go to it.

When it is all spread out before you and you are beginning to recover from the bare bones of reality, it is time to make a plan. What are you going to do about it? You can do this but if you are really stuck, don’t give up or give in to returning to that beckoning habit. Get some help.

Make it a goal!

P.S. Maybe start a support group for TV addicts?