Social Media: Breaking the Sleep Cycle
by Walt Carvalho
Let’s talk habits. Good habits. Bad habits. We all have them, some more than others.
Habits are protected and maintained. I’m sure you heard this or something similar:
“I always eat dinner at 6pm sharp!” or “It’s Happy Hour!” or “I need that cup of coffee first thing in the morning!”
Maybe you or someone you know will do the following: Get to work and find many parking spaces available but will still park in the same one you have every day for the last seven years!
It’s time for dinner and you sit in the same chair at your dining room table as you’ve done for countless dinners before!
You are free to go for a walk anywhere you wish but you choose the same route you have walked many times before. Yes my friends that is us being habitual.
We even repeat greetings and responses such as “Hi. How are you?” Answer: “I am fine, and you?”
Household chores have become no different “I always cut the front lawn before I cut the back!”
The lists go on and on and on. Filling our precious life with habits.
We all have habits. They are the places we can go to sleep. It’s where we can turn our minds off for a little while and just cruise on autopilot. It’s where creativity, zest and growth momentarily stop. It’s a place of in-between. It’s a place that protects us from change. It is that place where repetition is our master.
Our social media landscape has developed, through recent years, as a source of creative thinking and exchange. Many of the old habits of doing business are finding it harder and harder to continue on its same road. Decisions to grow are being made by some, while the rejection of letting go to old habits is the plan for others. Awakening from sleep and the ability to grow is what matters most in these times.
Those who are awake will go out and harvest while the others sleep.
Photo: http://www.aorta.se/
Thanks Walt! These articles certainly are starting to wake up my meditations on the possibilities of using the internet as a communication and marketing tool.
I’m so new to business and marketing, however, that I don’t have old habits (maybe one or two old ideas hanging around), so I might have an easier time adopting new habits . . .
I especially like the example you gave of one’s almost rehearsed response to “How are you?” We’re conditioned to “lie” out of a sense of politeness sometimes. Good stuff.