One year ago, I was convinced that there are just some people who can�t quit smoking successfully and that I was one of them. One year ago, I picked myself up from my third slip since first finding the site and quitting in June and was feeling pretty hopeless. Time and time again, you will read on this site that it takes desire, perseverance, positive attitude, strength, dedication, courage, commitment and many other things to quit smoking. [b]So then, what do you do if you don�t have those things?!?![/b] I didn�t! I also didn�t know if those were things that I [I]could[/I] ever have. How do you develop commitment? You stay committed to it until you�ve got it? I mean seriously! How do you develop something like that if you don�t already have it? Well, after several months of �trial and error� and one year of finally getting it right, I realized that I went about this thing the hard way. Quitting didn�t have to be as hard as it was for me, but I�m also glad that it was hard because I know that I never want to have to repeat that process. I can empathize with those who also have difficult quits so that I can hopefully help them to have easier ones.
I�ve learned a lot about myself and the quitting process over the last year, and would love to share what I have learned. But instead of writing one big long ramble that will be so long that nobody will even read it, I�ve decided to break my ramble up into several different rambles, each about one aspect of quitting smoking.
The first thing you need to have in order to quit smoking is desire. What does it mean to have a desire to quit smoking? First off, I have heard many smokers say that they don�t want to quit, but I believe this is not actually true. I believe that what they don�t want is to have to go through the withdrawals and the cravings that inevitably come when you quit smoking. Sure, there are probably some smokers out there who really and truly don�t want to quit, but I think that they are the minority. I personally don�t know of one single person who wouldn�t quit smoking if they could just simply put the cigarettes down and not ever think about smoking ever again. I�m sure the tobacco companies would have been put out of business a long time ago if that were the case. I mean, with
