This isn't the most exciting story--it's about trains and commuting--but there's a point to it. When I first starting working at the University of Roehampton up in south London, I would get the 170 bus from Clapham Junction. It was slow and crowded--crawling along the South Circular with the school runs--but it got me there; and it was what I knew. A few people said to me that another way of doing this would be to get an overground train from Clapham Junction to Barnes first, and then get a quicker bus. But when I thought overground train I thought 'unreliable,' 'slow', 'waiting for ages'. And it was one more change. So I never tried it.
Then a colleague starting doing this journey with me. She was very nice, and even though she normally took the overground train first; she got the bus with me because it was my way of doing things. Then, after a while--and after a while of her hinting that maybe we should try the overground train--we did. Well, it wasn't miraculous, but the overground train came pretty quickly, was a lot calmer, and saved about 15 minutes on the journey.
Next time, on my own, I did the journey by 170 bus again; but it was so slow and painful compared with the overground train that I went back to the train, and have pretty much continued doing that ever since. And the overground trains are actually pretty regular--much more than the busses--and they're faster and more reliable, and it gets me into work a bit earlier now and a lot less frazzled.
So what's the point of this story? Sometimes, we don't do things that are better for us because we have assumptions and prejudices, and we don't think to challenge them. Indeed, we sometimes don't even know that they can be challenged. It's just the way that we think things are. So changing for the better means being flexible and open about how we see things, and always being alert to new possibilities and options. It means taking the risk of trying out something new. It means attending to feedback from others and hearing from them how we might do things differently. And once we've found better ways of doing things, it's about bedding them in so that they become new habits. Change, perhaps, comes about through forging one new habit at the time: making the things that we find out are better for us the things that we just naturally do, even if it's finding a different route to work.