working toward your end goal. THE YO-YO EFFECT When all your energy is focused on reaching a particular goal, what do you have left to motivate you once you have achieved it? This is one of the reasons why people go back to old habits once they hit their target. The main aim of setting a goal is to win the game, whereas the main aim of building a system is to keep playing the game. Life isn’t about making single accomplishments, it’s about continuous improvement and ultimately, it’s your dedication to the process that will determine the extent of your progress. The good news is that there is nothing wrong with you if you are finding it difficult to build good habits. The problem is the system you are using. Bad habits remain not because you don’t want to change them but because you have adopted the wrong system. If your system is wrong, you will fail every time. Wuy You KEEP ON REPEATING BAD HABITS We all know the feeling of starting a good habit only to fall back into our bad habits a few days later. It appears that the habits that are good for us like exercise, journaling, and meditation are great for a day or two and then they just become a burden. Bad habits seem to be a part of our DNA and there doesn’t appear to be an end in sight. No matter how hard you try, unhealthy habits like smoking, eating junk food, procrastinating, and watching too much television seem impossible to overcome. There are two reasons why changing our bad habits is challenging: First, we focus on changing the wrong thing, and second, we focus on changing them in the wrong way. Let me break this down a bit further. THERE ARE LAYERS TO CHANGE I think of change like an onion—there are several layers and each layer is unique in its own right. Here are three of the main layers of change: 1. The Outcome: Goal setting involves changing outcomes; for example, you want to lose 20 lbs., you want to win first place in your chosen sport, you want to publish a book, etc. 2. The Process: Once you have set the goal, you then need to change