the nature of habits and myself

Earlier in October, I signed up for an online course that was committing to do a yoga practice at home for 30 days. The commitment would be supported through video and email support by the yoga teacher. After the course, theoretically, one has gotten into a habit of daily yoga.

While I have enjoyed the course and practicing yoga at home, I have not been able to manage to make it a habit. In fact, I believe I have an unusual predilection for not forming habits out of daily practices. I'm not saying that I don't have things that I do regularly - showering, checking email, etc. Or that I don't respond to certain stimuli in certain, patterned ways - over-eating when upset, tearing at my nails when nervous, etc. Those ideas aren't what I mean when I say habit. I mean willfully and purposefully putting in place behaviors that become so ingrained that eventually they become almost subconscious. Things like daily yoga/exercise, filling my bike tires weekly, regularly writing on a blog. I have great ambitions and seem to have rather poor follow through.

For example, all of my journals before my 17th birthday look like this - one week of daily writing, an entry two weeks later that tries to catch up and fails, one more aborted attempt to catch up, the rest is blank pages. This was my habit. By the time I was 17, even I had recognized this pattern in myself. So, when I received a beautiful journal from a friend for my birthday, I was reticent to do anything with it. I didn't want it to end up like all the others. I thought about it for a while and wondered what would happen if I didn't date my entries? What if I just wrote what I wanted and then put it aside? And then, it wouldn't matter if I picked it up the next day or in two weeks or in two months or two years. It would look like I was just starting from where I left off. I started the journal in January of 2000 and finished it, my only complete journal to date, around 6 years later. I started my current journal in January of 2006 and am not nearly halfway done.

What does this example say about me? And, can I translate it into something useful in my other goals for myself? How do go about setting up a habit without holding myself accountable to time? I guess I can't really say that I made journaling a habit. I did the opposite. I removed the element of regularity. It worked for what I wanted - to finish a journal - but it didn't make journaling a consistent part of my life. How can I remove my self-sabotaging expectations of myself while still holding myself accountable? Maybe I'll go contemplate it while in downward dog.