I’m running a three-month project-completion workshop starting on December 1st. It’s called Next Year Starts Now 🚀 and you can learn more here.
Do you trust yourself? A lot of people don’t.
One of the reasons for the self-doubt people feel when trying to change a behavior or start a new habit is that sustained change is hard. Did you know that nearly 80% of New Year’s resolutions are abandoned by the second week of February?
One challenge is that we approach change from a behavioral perspective without addressing the identity gap. If your goal of working out four times a week started strong but fell off after a long weekend or a friend visiting town, it’s not just because you aren’t committed. It’s because the new identity hasn’t been fully internalized.
If you instead started with doing five air squats while waiting for your kettle to heat up in the morning—a durable habit less susceptible to interruption given the context—you can much more easily build upon this habit with more activities that eventually spill over into the gym or onto the running trail.
And after twenty or thirty days of this, the habit starts becoming automatic. After months of this, it’s hard not to see yourself as a person who prioritizes fitness because the evidence is clear.
(Put another way, caffeine addicts coffee drinkers don’t have to summon the willpower to swing by their favorite coffee shop once they’ve found it, much less do they need to put time on their calendar to remember. It’s who they are.)
This applies to aspiring writers, programmers, or mindfulness practitioners. You might not have time to publish a thousand words, code an error-handling module, or sit on a cushion for 30 minutes every morning. But I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have time to pen one sentence, write a single line, or breathe for 30 seconds.
After a while, the identity of who you’re becoming gets assimilated. You move from “how could I possibly make time?” to the day not feeling right if you haven’t done the thing to which you’ve committed.
In Next Year Starts Now 🚀, we close the gap between the person we’re becoming and the person we are today. We have a bias for action, we start before we’re ready, and we’re doing the work.
