Resolutions:Why Small and Simple Works

You may already be steaming ahead with your New Year’s resolution. In which case, do keep going. The point of today’s post is to add in any extra info you may need to get moving and stay that way.

In yesterday’s post, there was a question about “the smallest habit” you could do on a daily (or regular) basis that would support you on the road to reaching the state you want by the end of this year. This is because small actions slip “under your radar”, and therefore are less likely to meet with any resistance from your unconscious mind. Nonetheless, when you add them together, form an impressive body of results when you add them together.

For example, if your goal or outcome is to reach a defined level of fitness, just ten minutes of a certain exercise on each of the 366 days this year would be the equivalent of doing the same exercise non-stop for almost 13 days. Not to mention the cumulative strength you’d get over time, that wouldn’t be available after such an exhausting couple of weeks…Or the ease with which you can carry out your “simple” habit once you’ve repeated it the first few times.

There may even be other changes that naturally occur, once the repetition of this simple habit effortlessly alters your perception of yourself to allow other changes in. Continuing with the “fitness” example, the ten-minute exercise might then also spill over, a few months down the line, into your feeling healthier. As we tend to be wired to maintain a steady state, you’d then probably be motivated to maintain that healthy feeling. In turn, that may translate into your wanting to make simple changes to your diet. ( I can personally vouch for this having happened to me, last year, and much to my surprise).

So, small and simple habits really work. If you’ve already thought of one, great. If not, please do so now. And then…Please make it even simpler or easier.

I know, that’s an odd request. But the majority of people are unused to being asked to do something simple and easy, and tend to over-estimate how much they’ll feel motivated to do on a daily basis, but to underestimate the cumulative effect of tinier actions. For instance, if your goal is to complete a novel this year, ask yourself whether you’ll be better to produce 250 words per day that feel easy to achieve each whatever else is going on, or 1000 that only appear on the days when your boss/kids/partner/friends/family (delete or add as applicable) don’t vie for your attention.

(In case you were wondering about that, by the way, 250 words x 366 days comes to 91,500 words, or a 305-page novel at 300 words per page.)

Enough said. In the next post, we’ll be talking about how you can remove the blocks to your own progress…including one of the biggest resolution-killers of them all.

Hope this helps.

More soon.

Clare