Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Primal Potential podcast. I am Elizabeth Benton.

Thanks for joining me for another episode in our consistency 365 series.

I shared the other day that often the most profound solutions, the most impactful opportunities for change

and often the ones that are so obvious, we don't even see them.

Or if we see them, we don't choose them because it seems too simple, but change isn't necessarily easy, but it is usually very simple,

and alarmingly simple, deceivingly simple. So what I want to share with you today is that in every moment of every part of your life,

you are either reinforcing an existing pattern or creating a new one.

So if you are saying I'll do better tomorrow, that is reinforcing an existing pattern or it's creating a new one.

The way that you respond to your children is either reinforcing an existing pattern or it's creating a new one, the way that you talk to your spouse,

the way that you think about yourself, the way that you make a food decision, the very food decision that you make, you are either reinforcing an existing pattern or creating a new one.

This morning when I woke up, I really did not want to have water before I had coffee.

That is a pattern that is important to me always having water before I have coffee, having water before I eat, choosing water before I do almost anything is a way of not only drinking more water, of course, but also practicing mindfulness, paying attention to what I am doing.

Well this morning not only was I not feeling water, it just wasn't in the mood for water, I was really in the mood for coffee, really in the mood for coffee.

And there was this moment of thinking, it doesn't really matter, it's not a big deal. I'll have water before my second cup of coffee, like it's not a big deal.

In that moment I choose to either reinforce an existing pattern or create a new one. If I were to go with that thought, it's not really a big deal, it's one cup of water, who cares, this is not a big deal.

If I were to go with that thought, I would have been strengthening that pattern, I would have been establishing it in the same way that we can put major ruts if we were to drive through our yard.

My husband does this all the time, so I think about this as an example of the time he drives his truck back to where our goats and our chickens are.

And I'm always on him, don't keep going in the same path because after it rains, the ground is soft, and if you keep driving in the same place, we're just going to have these deep tire tracks in the yard.

You can just go six inches to the left, six inches to the left, but if you keep going in the same path eventually there's going to be a trench there, there's going to be significant evidence that that is the well-worn path.

And so we do that, it's like driving that truck on that path, and then we do it one more time, it's a little bit deeper, and we do it one more time, and it's a little bit deeper.

And then it becomes more difficult to go any other place because that's the well-worn way with every single choice you make.

With every thought that you have, with every interaction that you engage in, you are either strengthening an existing habit or you're creating a new one.

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