Resolve and Resolution - Making Habits Stick
As a new year settles in and we get back to the business of busyness, we find that dust often starts to settle on the resolutions we’ve made. Usually, we’re trying to change, limit, increase, expand or begin something or other. It could be related to our health, our finances, our creativity or productivity. It may be our parenting, prayer, meditation or means of communication. Whatever it is, we always kick off with a sense of enthusiasm and excitement that is only galvanised by the celebration of a new year, time away from our requisite, gainful employment and the enervating presence of loved ones we may not see as often as we’d like.
Then, on the cusp of February we tend to sheepishly note that we have, already, slipped in our efforts and their subsequent efficacy. We want to write it off as a minor hurdle, but before we know it, we slip back into old habits and states of being, sweeping the resolution under the carpet and foolishly writing it off as a lost cause. Somehow, our failure to implement change in the first 90 days of a new year is an excuse to set aside our health, our faith, our discipline until January lumbers around again.
Such an abandonment is ridiculous, childish and ill-advised. Hence, before you turn your back on the new beginning you’ve made, consider the Wristwatches and Radios guide to making your resolutions stick. As husbands, fathers, sons, brothers and men of creative and disciplinary intent, you need to know how to effect change in your own life if you’re ever going to be of value to the family and community around you. So consider the following and relish the joys of self-mastery and newfound disciplines.
1) Don’t underestimate your capacity to change
Most of us have known someone in our lives who have made remarkable changes across a range of aspects in their lives. Beyond that, all of us at some point of another have made a remarkable shift in our behaviours that seemed all but impossible in the months and years before that. It could be quitting cigarettes, or carbs, or making our first steps into a new field or career. It could be the financial turnaround, the travel or the abandonment of a toxic relationship we never thought we’d escape. Don’t be discouraged by the seemingly endless examples of people who didn’t pull of an intended shift in behaviours: look to the countless examples of those (including yourself) who have taken incredible steps to shift, change and improve what they’re doing and how they do it.
2) Be violent and uncompromising in your intent
The comfort and convenience of Western living softens us up in ways that are often hard to notice if you fail to look. We become so attached to a standard of living and an absence of discomfort, challenge or risk that eventuates in self-indulgent rambling about food, weather and all sorts of meaningless, trivial inconsequential banalities. Unless we challenge ourselves in ways that create discomfort in the disciplined pursuit of a better self and a better world (training, fasting, parenting etc.), we forget our capacity to endure, create and renew. Don’t make resolutions that are trivial and facetious. Be violent and uncompromising in your intent, by getting to the heart of what you’re seeking to change, eradicate or create. Weak, meaningless resolutions inspire little resolve, little resistance or traction to truly move. ‘Going to the gym more often’ gives little sense of what your life will look like, or why it even matters. ‘Spend more time with my kids’ is similarly vague. Be specific, real and be brazen: ‘Spend one hour of quality time a day with my kids’ invites you to truly consider what it looks like and what you’ll need to do to make it happen.
3) Be public about it
Whenever you can, make your resolutions public. It doesn’t necessarily need to be shared across a range of social media platforms to make it work, but you should seriously consider opening yourself up to dialogue, challenge and yes, even the shame of failure. A culture of constant coddling and oversensitivity does little to inspire a meaningful pursuit of discipline, so share your intended changes with your loved ones, with your community. If people understand what you’re trying to do and why it’s important to you, you’ll be more accountable not only to yourself, but to the world around you - THIS ISN’T A BAD THING. The opinions and perceptions of those around us matter. That’s why we don’t tend to do our groceries in our pyjamas and we do chew gum after a potent meal. The joyous, ebullient narratives we build about our lives on social media could be (shockingly) honest about the lives we’re trying to build, to motivate us to enjoy a deeper and richer challenge of accountability and furthermore, celebration of true change and success.
4) Find out what actually works - and works for you
Learning what actually works is critical to effecting change in your habits and processes. Spending time immersing yourself in the research, the anecdotes, the communities and conversations around what’s effective will make a critical difference to your life and the lives around you. One example is exercising for weight loss, which research demonstrates, is simply not effective. Exercise will help enormously when it comes to emotional wellbeing and disease prevention, but in regards to weight loss - forget it. Do the research into what actually works and experiment to see what actually works for you.
5) Bind your resolution to an existing habit
One of the best aspects of habit change I ever took on board (it came from the incredible Charles Duhigg) was to bind your intended new habits to existing ones. For example, I once moved our family’s rubbish bins right outside our garage where our home gym is. This made it a little more inconvenient to take out the trash (which was essential, so no big deal), but brought me five steps away from the bench and the squat rack. There was little to no resistance then (no pun intended) to take those further five steps and sneak in a set before heading back inside to attend to my family.
Take what you’re trying to implement and affix it to an existing routine or habit. If you’re trying to read more, keep your book with your wallet and car keys. When you’re waiting in the car park you’ll pick up your book instead of your phone. Trying to keep in touch with the people you love? Make one phonecall a day on your drive home from work. Trying to make time for prayer or meditation? Build it into your kids’ settling and bedtime rituals. Find the existing, requisite routines that are already in place and hijack them to facilitate the new ones.
6) Incremental revolution
One more tip to making these changes sustainable is to begin incrementally, which works wonders in overcoming the kinds of psychological barriers we often erect to hold ourselves back. If it’s a creative discipline, one example would be to play five minutes of your instrument a day. Five minutes. Don’t begin with half an hour, or an hour. The simple satisfaction of getting to it every day, and ticking it off successfully, compounded by the joy of the activity itself, will build to naturally increase, often without us even noticing it. Trying to be more physically active, begin with something as simple as ten push ups every morning. It’s harder - much harder - to make excuses to avoid ten damn push ups. Getting the habit in place and feeling the natural benefits of nailing it will compound over time and make an irrevocable difference in your life - building into the set of habits and disciplines that you envisage will allow you to serve the world around you in better ways.
7) Schedule the time and reminders
Another critical element to the success of your resolutions is to actually schedule the time into your day. If you’re trying to read a novel a month or hammer out 500 words a day, it’s not going to magically happen without strategically building in the time to accomplish it. Use your calendar or schedule, be it on your phone or your diary, to map out where you’ll actually set everything else aside to make this happen. It might be in the early hours of the day before the rest of the family are awake. It might be in those precious, quiet hours of the night that can be so easily wasted on other trivialities. It might be ten minutes at the start of each lunch break, every day. Without consciously, purposefully setting the time aside, it simply isn’t going to happen.
8) Track progress
Another powerful element in sticking to your habit is tracking your progress. Set up a simple wall chart, checklist, spreadsheet or a nifty habit tracking app (such as Commit or Way of Life) to get this done. It keeps you focused, conscious and accountable, making it ever so harder to slip back into old habits and forget that you’re trying to accomplish something. Once again, the satisfaction of maintaining a habit and seeing your simple successes stacking up is very empowering.
9) Reward Successes - Deconstruct your Falls
Along with tracking comes the opportunity to reward your successes and deconstruct your falls. Getting a reward and enjoying it is a critical aspect of building a new habit, as it reinforces your tendency to repeat the desired behaviour again and again. Whenever possible, bind the reward into the habit itself, such as a new book for reading ten days straight, or buying yourself a coffee if you make it up for an early start.
Furthermore, it’s important to deconstruct your falls when they take place. If you’ve been slipping, take the time to pull the experience apart and find out why. Is it near impossible to maintain your disciplines in particular social settings? Have you filled your pantry full of sugary junk when you’re trying to eat clean? Have you removed all obstacles and built the new habit into an existing one? Or, do you truly want to create this change in your life and all that comes with it? You can decide to make an early start on the day to attend to practices and disciplines that require silence and solitude, but it’s not going to work with a string of late nights and sleeping with your alarm clock within arms reach when you wake. Find out what’s not working, figure out why and attend to it.
10) Review, Reflect and Ponder
The last point about rewarding successes and deconstructing falls leads to a final requisite point: keep a journal to review, reflect and ponder. The process of habitually taking the time to sit and reflect, putting it down on the page makes an enormous difference to the clarity and insight you can come to have about your life. You will uncover and discover aspects of your experience, your relationships and your place in the world that will only come to light when you take the time to articulate and express all that you’ve been, seen and done - and furthermore - where you want to take it all.
So take the time now to consider what matters most in your life. What is it that you want to shift, to create, to strengthen that will bring new energy and clarity to the work you do in your art, your family and your community? Decide on the simple, powerful shifts that can restore both dignity and efficacy to your day to day experience. Be relentless in your intent. Share your goals with people around you. Find out what actually works - and what works for you. Bind it to an existing process or habit. Make the time. Track your progress and reward your successes. Deconstruct your failures and remember to review, reflect and ponder to truly understand what’s set you on this path in the first place.
Godspeed good people.