We need to mix things up to get our heads in a fit state... do the next thing that you have to do in way that you don't normally do it. Have your next meeting standing up or sitting in somebody else's place; have a cup of tea instead of coffee; run your left hand through your hair instead of your right. We are robots- psychology even uses the term "autopilot". If we want to achieve new and exciting things, we've to do new things... they don't even need to be exciting: new will do! But doing new doesn't start with the next big initiative you've decided to take, it starts now - like everything starts now.

"And true to form, Mary sat in front of me, with her big dirty hand and plunged straight into my French Fries and ate every single one of them" so concluded a story recently told to me by Mike, a friend who was recounting one of his many hilarious stories about... you've guessed it... normal crazy people - in this case a woman(a mutual friend) whose social skills leave something to be desired.

I met Mary a couple of weeks later and said to her that I'd heard that she was still going around gobbling other people's food in high-class restaurants! "What do you mean?" she said "there were no French Fries involved, I'm on a diet!"

Next time I spoke to Mike I suggested to him that Mary hadn't eaten his French Fries... "Oh no" he said "you didn't mention that to Mary, did you?" When I said I had he continued "I just made that whole story up! I make lots of things up... I tell little fibs... it makes me sound more interesting!"

Ummm - who's the normal crazy person now?

Today's video explores the deep-seated nature of our habituation. Habituation is at the root of all the problems in our lives: we do the habitual automatically and we become so good at it that we cannot do anything new. Anything? Yes, pretty much anything because, allied to habituation, we have an inbuilt psychological capacity to categorize: we box new things and people into predefined pigeonholes (we defined them ourselves as a result of what was done for us and to us during the first three years of our lives) so that even the new is habitual.

But, even without the Achilles heel of categorization, we've become very used to who we think we are ourselves - that too was established during the first three years of our lives and, as a result, we are as good as incapable of shaking ourselves out of the deadly slumber that "enables" make it from one day to the next.

Few people wake up - they play at waking up, they pretend to be "more focused" (often without even understanding what that actually means), they lull themselves into the false sense that they have taken control of their own lives. A quick evaluation of their circumstances, however, would lead them to conclude that they had skirted around the edges of their existence without getting to the heart of the matter.

Does anyone ever get to the heart of the matter? Does anyone lead a truly liberated, fully-woken-up life? God alone knows - but doing your damnest to get towards that objective is well worth it. As we saw a couple of weeks ago, research proves that you get more done with less effort when you've begun to develop purposeful focus. Decades of research have established beyond doubt that people who are in this state of "flow" are pretty happy and successful - some may even be extraordinary successful... all feel more in control of who they are and what they want from life.

At the same time research has established that a few minutes meditation for just eight weeks will "rewire" those parts of your brain that nothing else touches! - the part that enables you do the ncessary, pretty much effortlessly, to get you to where you want to go. It's a recipe for happiness and success that is worth its weight in gold - something worth establishing a new habit for!