New Years Resolution Hack: Aim for habits

Man, do I love the smell of a fresh year.

Crispy new stationery, damp summer evenings, long days and warm nights. It’s hard not to feel excited about a new start, and it’s easier to feel empowered for change when you’re sporting a tan.

I’m busy sniffing stationery and working on my tan too, so it’s not a long one this week. But I did want to fire out a quick note for those of you setting resolutions for the new year.

If you’re anything like me, you might have the tendency to go all or nothing on these things. I find myself fighting the urge to write a seriously overambitious list once I get going. The pregnant sense of possibility offered by the holiday break makes it seem realistic to fit in all kinds of aspirations for my health, fitness, career, parenting, social life, travel and hobbies. Except there are just as many hours in the day this year as there were in 2019!

If you’ve been in the tribe for a while, you might get an inkling where I’m about to go with this.

Yep.

It’s that focus thing again.

Focus beats balance. Every. Single. Time.

"Most dazzling human achievements are, in fact, the aggregate of countless individual elements, each of which is, in a sense, ordinary.” 
― Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

If you’re wanting to make big change this year - transformative change - consider taking a leaf out of Gary Keller’s book. Like, his actual book. Pick The One Thing that will take you the closest and the fastest to your goals, and throw all of your limited bandwidth at that, before you tackle anything else.

The best thing about this strategy is that it doesn’t have the be a BIG thing.

In fact, it’s generally best that it isn’t. James Clear talks a lot about habits – the transformative power of taking a small behaviour and embedding it so firmly into your life that it’s now just part of the way you live. Because, in aggregate, these small behaviours become the building blocks of our everyday existence.. 

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems."
 - James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way To Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

The power of focusing on a single issue or behaviour is that you can drive it through to habit even more quickly than usual – and then move on to the next!

First up for me this year: adding daily journaling to my morning routine to get all the random crap out of my head before the day starts.