how to build good habits … instead of making then breaking new year’s resolutions.
Health, family, community and happiness are the big ones, right? So let’s help each other build good habits for life. That’s good habits forever that make our life better. I know, I know puns are the worst. Bad habits are hard to kick, but so are good ones so to achieve our goals let’s start scratching away at them, because our goals should be our life’s work not the work of a year and then as quickly forgotten.
Dream big then break it down!
So let’s come up with the big dream, don’t rush it, this is the fun part. We’ll work out how we’ll get there later, for now just get a nice blank piece of paper and some coloured pens for an old fashioned brain storming of all the things you ever wanted to achieve. Don’t rate them, let them flow, even the little ideas might help you work out the bigger picture.
Let’s make it worth it, what’s one thing that will make life better for you? Not make people envy you or make you the cardboard cutout of success, no no no, white picket fence and a sports car in the driveway is so last century. What will make you happier and healthier and more fulfilled? It doesn’t have to be grand, but a worthwhile aspiration will probably tick off a number of smaller dreams on your list as well.
The New Year’s Resolution Approach would be to select one (or even more disastrous, all), clink a glass of Champagne and stumble into January with blind resolve. Feeling inspired for a new you, working hard, getting bored, tired and frustrated (a merry cocktail indeed) and giving up or just getting distracted. So to win at life we might actually need a game plan.
So the best goal will have links to other things in your list and not be too whimsical. So ‘learn French’ isn’t really up there, if I had move to France with handsome French husband then it would definitely be part of it, but that’s not something I’m interested in (so don’t worry Dylan). Same with learn an instrument, unless one of my dreams is seriously to be in a band.
The why motivation
If you really want to reach your goal, and sooner rather than later, you better have some pretty good reasons to get you excited. It’s not just the getting started, it’s the not giving up. If you ask yourself “why the hell am I doing this for?” a week, month or year in and don’t have a good answer you’ll give up and maybe it wasn’t worth it after all. “Because it makes me seem more interesting and cool” just won’t cut it.
You need weapons to defeat the “cant be bothered” monster!
Here are some question to get you going, can you think of any more good ones to ask? Don’t limit your self think emotional as well as pragmatic, mental as well as physical.
What will it help you achieve? Why is this important? Will it give you better quality of life?
Will it mean doing more of what you love? (This one is important, if you don’t choose something that involves something you already like and will enjoy doing a lot of the time it just won’t be worth it.)
And less of what you hate? What are you unhappy about in your current situation?
And more of what you’re neglecting?
And will it support causes you admire rather than deplore?
Who else will it help?
This is the list you stick in your wallet, on your fridge or have tattooed on your arm because it’s important to never loose track of why you are doing something, the how and when can evolve but the why should be your solid foundation.
As you can see I have chosen “build a local sustainable community”, originally I chose be self-sufficient, but after our rocky start to this year it became clear that whilst being self-sufficient is an honourable ideal what I really need and the sustainability movement too is COMMUNITY. It’s just no fun if you do things alone, and I might just get a bit closer to my self-sufficiency goal if I work, learn, teach, share and have fun with a group of like minded individuals at my own back door. The only way to convince people to be more sustainable is to show that at its heart it is just more fun and fulfilling. I haven’t had a lot of fun lately so perhaps it’s time to start.
No your enemy!
It’s that little wheedling voice making excuses when your at your weakest, say when a task coincides with a rerun of Mad Men on a rainy day.
So why you haven’t been able to organically and easily achieve your goal yet. What internally and externally has made it hard? Once you work this out you can figure out how to overcome those obstacles. This is a great way to exorcise all those little demons of self-doubt, laziness and plain whininess. It’s not always easy to creak into gear, floating can be so much more fun, but you’re just drifting to a big fat boring nowhere.
The following might be issues:
Convenience of bad, inconvenience of the good
Addictions, whether they be too sugar, watching TV, facebook, or something harder
Social pleasures or pressures
Imbalance, exhaustion and over work
Money, generally the lack of it
Bad habits and routine
Lack of knowledge and confidence
Difficulty
Time poor
Fear of change
Boredom
So let’s work out your excuses while your feeling strong and motivated so you can pound that wheedling guy into dust.
Keeping it bite sized
So now we can finally start working out some good habits, a salve to those bad ones. So let’s break your dream up into mini goals, we’re short term thinkers for the most part, that is why our world’s going to hell in a handbasket as our adorable grannies would say, so let’s make it work for us. So short term goals for long term benefit. One of mine is to start up a Flemington Food Swap, perhaps I’ll see you there. It’s a way to connect to the community, find passionate people to help me and most important of all it will be fun! It’s one step, but when it gains momentum I will feel a sense of achievement. It’s important to be kind to yourself, you won’t always succeed, sometimes you’ll falter and give in to your excuses, but instead of beating yourself up, thing about what you have achieved no matter how small and get back on the horse.
Getting in the habit
So we’ve got our dream and we’ve got our goals but how do we achieve them?
Have you ever woken up exhausted, and some how you ate your breakfast, got your teeth brushed, dressed and out the door, you can hardly remember doing them, but you almost literally sleepwalked through them. That’s because they are habits, you do them everyday, they are routine. That’s what we have do to achieve our goals as painlessly as possible. Steps so tiny they seem ridiculous but the beauty is you hardly notice them and you can build them up slowly like dunes being formed by grains of sand.
I read one example of a guy who was told by his doctor to floss his teeth every night. He would always starts enthusiastically, but come his next appointment it might have been months since the last time he flossed. So he said he would floss one tooth every night, just one. It took only a second, so he could never justify not doing it and more often than not once he got started he would end up flossing his whole mouth. Sometimes it’s just the getting started that’s hard, then your body takes over from your mind.
So make a list of all those little things you do everyday, or every week. Then work out new little “habits” you can tag on to them to help you reach your goal.
A goal might be to eat healthier. An obstacle might be that you are so tired after work that getting take away is what you end up guiltily doing. You might then have a mini goal of preparing meals and freezing them so all you have to do is heat them up after work. Habits you might start to achieve this are: every Sunday morning go to the farmer’s market for breakfast; when you make a meal double it and freeze half; when you get up Saturday morning soak some beans, etc.
Or if you want to produce no waste, instead of starting cold turkey you might still go to the supermarket but a habit might be: when you buy packaged food only buy it in glass jars you can reuse for preserves or after you have filled your basket put two packaged items back.
It could even just be after you brush your teeth spend 5 minutes cleaning or blogging or practicing. You’ll do more than 5 when you feel like it, but even when you don’t 5 minutes is so little it’s not hard to smash through it. Don’t give yourself room to procrastinate by making it too formidable.
When you’ve locked in one small habit add another.
Review and rework
This is the final step. Don’t just slavishly follow your plan into the ground, if things aren’t working they need a tweak. Start small, but don’t be afraid to reassess your goals, after all we change, sometimes we don’t realise something is not what we really want until we almost achieve it. Only you and perhaps the ones you love who have the benefit of perspective can know what’s right, dreams evolve.
But at the micro level if you’re struggling to make a habit stick ask yourself:
Why am I struggling to change?
Can I make it easier for myself?
Can I remove temptation?
What can I replace it with?
Now this is not replacing one evil with another, it’s figuring out what positive aspects a former negative habit had that you have lost. Things aren’t black and white. Perhaps giving up coffee or cigarettes meant also giving up a 10 minute break from staring at a computer screen, a chance to chat to co-workers, stretch your legs. My co-worker and I have come up with the idea of a “pause pomme” (an apple break) where we each eat and apple and walk around the block.
Could eating out be replaced with rotating dinner parties with friends or potluck suppers?
Is keeping your room neat as simple as having a drawer you can dump your clean laundry in until you have time to sort it rather than what happens to us, a vicious cycle of clothesline, hamper, bed, floor.
But most important of all, don’t lose sight of your ultimate goal.
Well I hope you’ve gotten something out of this. Let me know if you have any tips!
I’ll share my progress with my goals as I go. Honestly finishing this post feels like aback patting moment for me, it’s been sitting in my drafts for so long!
So wishing you all happiness and inspiration for every day and every tooth flossed! Good night.
