Habit Frontiers
Forming Healthy Habits, by Jane Williams
It takes 66 days to form a habit according to ritual.com, but what if you have no one to show you what a healthy habit is.
Twenty-five years ago, I befriended two sisters with several kids each. In the beginning of the relationship, I often scheduled times to meet with them, only to find when I arrived, they were not home. After several of these experiences, I asked them why this kept happening. One of them immediately told me, “We aren’t used to people doing what they say they are going to do. We never thought you were really going to show up.”
I have thought of this comment a lot recently as we have started working with 18- to 24-year-olds experiencing homelessness through a HUD pilot program to stabilize their lives. HUD will provide rent assistance while we provide supportive services to teach the life skills needed to maintain housing and employment. So far, one of our biggest challenges has been the young adults not showing up for appointments. Many of them have aged out of foster care and experienced lives of broken promises. It is now up to us to demonstrate consistency and help them develop the basic habits of successful living.
Through the years, we have helped hundreds of people learn sound financial habits. The joy of walking alongside someone to financial stability and flourishing cannot be overstated. I still remember when one of our first clients threw her arms around me and said, “I used to love to spend and now I love to save.” I’ve also never forgotten a graduate of our Extra Mile money management program ringing our joy bell and shouting that not only did she know what a FICO score was but so did her children!
Starting Early
Through the years, we have pressed into new “habit-forming” territory. After noticing that parents often overspent because of pleas from their children, we added kid’s activities to our adult financial coaching material. We knew we had to get the kids to join the “needs versus wants” team and rewarded parents for including their children in budgeting and saving activities.
We replicated this approach when we established our Extra Mile Homes transitional housing program. We had expectations for parents to keep the house clean and tidy and provided them with ideas about how to get their children involved in age-appropriate chores.
Later, when parents wanted to learn activities to strengthen their families, volunteers helped us develop monthly activity kits for families to use together to promote regular family time.
We hope we are helping kids form great habits early on – how to budget money, keep a house clean and live and play together as a family.
Our Latest Habit Frontier: Creating Beauty
At a recent staff meeting, we discussed the value of beauty in our lives. We pause in nature, with art or music, and our load seems lighter and our thoughts brighter. What if we cultivated a habit of creating beauty? What if we provided the opportunity for our clients to create beauty when they are feeling stressed or overwhelmed? Would this help them develop a habit of looking for and creating beauty in the midst of difficult situations and dark times? We threw out the idea of providing coloring books and colored pencils for clients who wanted to try the beauty option to de-stress and reset their thinking. Two days later, to our surprise, a representative from The Food Bank stopped by the office and asked if we could use 15 cases of adult coloring books (96 books each).
We are all set to begin helping people form habits of creating beauty in the mist of stress. If you are a creator of beauty of any kind, please come share your ideas and skills. We may find that beauty is step one and all the other healthy habits soon follow. Doesn’t every day begin with a beautiful sunrise?
See below for some of the beauty created by our neighbors!
Stay fascinated,
