Novel New Year’s Strategy Part 1 (Project Spark)

I am working on a couple strategies for improving how we approach New Year’s resolutions. There’s more to come, but here’s where we begin:

You want to create better habits. It’s New Year’s, and you want to start something new. You know most New Year’s resolutions fail within weeks. Change is hard. There’s resistance. There’s effort required.

How do we make it easier to get the ball rolling? Momentum is everything. Pick something extremely small and trivial. Something you have are so confident in your ability to do that it might sound embarrassing to tell people. It’s the first step in your New Year’s plan. It could be something like brushing your teeth twice a day, taking your vitamins, deleting Netflix, etc. Very small, very achievable. Now we take this and we make a contract to do it consistently for two weeks. 14 days. Less than 4% of the year. Anyone can do something once, but change takes place when habits are formed.

The purpose of this exercise is to demonstrate to yourself that you have the capacity for discipline. To be consistent. To make change. It’s like a warm-up. A stretch before a workout. If you tried to set a PR as your first set of the day, you'd know it's a terrible idea. You'd either get hurt or fail. So don’t try to enact and elaborate New Year’s resolution that requires discipline planning before you stretch that muscle.

Finish the two weeks by whatever means necessary. Timers, phone reminders, sticky notes. During that time, feel how a habit forms, what conscious and concentrated effort feels like, and how good it feels to do hard things. Then we can start on the real shit.

Comment below what you guys are choosing as your spark. Mine is deleting my personal Instagram profile off of my phone!

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