Quitting is not easy!

If changes were only as easy as mousing over our friend above.

When people decide to change a habit, attitude, profession or mate, their success or failure invariably depends their replacement's quality or a significant change in their routine.
     Great replacement – success usually follows.
     No replacement, or an inappropriate one – excuses usually follow.
    For example, there are hundreds of approaches to quit smoking. Most don't work because they don't measure up as ideal replacements for smoking. For example, chewing a special gum sounds like a good idea, but after a great meal with appropriate wines and aperitifs, gum hardly cuts it as a replacement for that cigarette – so much for my smoking example.

Daily bad habits need daily replacements
     It seldom works if your daily habit is to be replaced by a reward that does not occur for several months. Daily bad habits have to be replaced by daily good habits. Promising yourself a super vacation with money you save by refraining from those “expensive coffees” usually means you keep drinking those coffees, go on your vacation anyway, and charge it to your credit card.
    Diets seldom work because people haven't thought of a replacement for excessive eating. Remember, one person's replacement will not necessarily work for someone else.

Find solutions unique to your situation
    One person discovered that their excessive time at their table was an aversion to table cleaning, doing dishes, and putting things away. Time spent on post-meal activities far exceeded time spent eating their meal. When combined with preparation time, it took more time working on a meal than eating. So, she got her “money's worth” by making certain that here meal was really a banquet – and gained a lot of weight.
     In this case, her replacement was to limit her meals to “boil in a bag” or “heat in the oven” commercial meals that came in their own containers. She used chopsticks and plastic glasses. When her controlled-portion meal was finished, all she had to do was wipe off the chopsticks and throw everything else in her garbage. Cleaning up took less than a minute. She then spent her newfound time relaxing with her favourite book for half an hour. That half-hour reading was essential. During every meal she was in a hurry to get it over to enjoy a “reward” of a few more chapters. In her first year on her diet, she lost 40 pounds and read 18 books. Her book reading before was less than a book a year.
    Ideal replacements have to be accessible at the same time, under similar circumstances and, ideally, cost less. Replacements for habits, professions or mates are obvious.

Changing attitudes confronts your history
    Changes in attitude require more ingenuity to find ideal replacements because prejudices are rooted deep within your psyche. Most often they have resided there for decades.
     Particularly difficult is changing an attitude about a race, especially if it involves colour.
    Changing an attitude requires little more than meaningful exposure to those“other guys”. Without forethought, this is not easy to accomplish. Choices of where to live, extra-curricular activities, entertainment and even a choice of which church to attend can be made based on colour or nationality. It can be difficult to run into “other guys” if you follow your regular routines.
     A decision to eliminate prejudice against whites, blacks, reds or yellows needs to include a meaningful exposure to these colours. A prejudice that has a long time to fester usually makes exposure difficult. It will require an effort. And, don't expect to be welcomed with open arms. “Other guys” have prejudices as well.
     I have been eliminating prejudice aimed at me for more than 50 years. Most often I owe my success to my prior preparation to deal with prejudice others may have to my colour, my race, my nationality and my atheism.

You have to find some common ground
     I engage in conversation at lunch counters, on buses, at sports venues, on golf courses and at swimming pools. Lately I have added another location, our local cancer clinic. I make a point of sitting next to “other guys”. In this case, a smiling face is a welcome diversion, even if it comes packaged in a different “colour”.
    Next, I find a common topic like sports teams, food choices, weather, what school they went to, when their family come to North America (if they are other than native), or things they remember about their grandparents. In most cases, my last one – stories about grandparents and great grandparents brings out people's best.

Good opening questions help
    Often I conduct one of my surveys. One of my current passions is to find out if people know “genocide's” definition; if they can name three examples; and which had a bigger death toll. My surveys always help to break ice.
     To discourage them from getting into an “anger” thing about how their people were mistreated, I first tell them my heritage. I do it without anger or a chip on my shoulder. Everybody's claims of being a victim usually disappears quickly when this blue-eyed white candidly points out that he is a Gypsy – our world's most despised minority.
    But, then again, I enjoyed an artificial acceptance over because I also sported a WASP name as a result of my adoption. That further disguised my heritage. (I changed my name back to my birth name more than 15 years ago.) I am not as socially acceptable now as a Ukrainian, although, few know that I am a Ukrainian Gypsy.

Hospitals great places to mix with "other guys"
    I never have trouble breaking ice at our cancer clinic. I find that most patients surrender their prejudice when faced with much bigger challenges.
    Some believe they couldn't survive their ordeal without their faith in a god. I let them be. They need their faith. On the other hand, I owe my survival of my personal ordeal to the fact that I have learned to live  . . . without gods!  

                                            Anton Kozlik 

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        *Terms and            Definitions
My articles may contain words or phrases that may infer different meanings to different readers, or my reader may be unfamiliar with a term or its definition. I feel it is important to know what writers meant when they used a word or term.

genocide — the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group.

cognitive dissonance —
Filtering out information that conflicts with what one already believes, in an effort to ignore that information and reinforce one’s beliefs.

Editors note: I will be repeating the “cognitive dissonance” definition for quite a while since it is practiced by so many — known by so few!