Any worthwhile achievement is inherently difficult to achieve. People don’t just wake up one day wanting nothing more than to run a mile, thus making it a habit they perform for the rest of their life. Creating change in your life takes time, effort, energy, and sacrifice.
Because of this, more often than not, people make a goal but fail to follow through.
That’s why most people don’t exercise or eat healthy.
It’s why they procrastinate, have cluttered homes, drink soda, and smoke cigarettes.
It’s why most of us don’t bother to meditate, learn new languages, write every day, or read more books.
With a small amount of initial discipline and strategy, you can create habits that stick.
Here are some tips on how to build something I like to call sticktoitiveness.
Sticktoitiveness Requires Starting With One Thing At A Time
When it comes to wanting to create change in your life, it’s easy to get ahead of yourself, but I’m here to remind you to slow down and take things one at a time.
It’s easy to start a habit, then after a few days decide to add another and another, but this will make it all the more difficult to stick to your original goal.
Don’t underestimate the amount of focus and effort it takes to actually stick to a new habit! Before you continue any further down this journey, make a mental note that you WILL NOT add additional goals to your primary objective.
Set ONE single goal to stick to.
If you’re at a place in your life where you feel as though you need a lot of change, then it can be difficult to narrow all your desires down to one goal moving forward.
Start Small
When it comes to setting habits that stick, slow and steady wins the race. If you make huge changes all at once, you’re likely to crash because the evolution is unsustainable for the long term.
Say your goal is to start doing an hour of yoga every day. At the beginning of this journey, making this goal happen is going to be near impossible because it’s such a big change.
Sure, you might be able to do it for a few days in a row, but after that, staying on track is going to become more and more difficult.
To avoid disappointment, try not to focus on results as you’re forming the habit.
Let’s go back to our yoga example--start with three poses a day. Will you get a great workout? No. Will you become more flexible and mindful? Not right away. But that’s not the point. The goal, in the beginning, is to just get into the habit of DOING the thing (in this case, yoga) each day.
Long story short, don’t overwhelm yourself! The process of creating change is just that—a process! It doesn’t happen overnight, and that’s okay.
Create a game plan for change, starting with something VERY small!
Pay Attention To Your Environment
While you’re in the beginning stages of creating change, take steps to restructure your environment so that you’re less tempted to fall back into old ways.
Say you’re trying to set aside time to build a personal website, but you know that your streaming services are always tempting you to cue up another episode instead of sitting down at your computer. As a resolution, create a better space to do your work and eliminate some of the comforts that might call to you from the couch—like that extra fuzzy blanket and phone charger that’s within arm’s reach.
Or, maybe you’re trying to be a more organized person. This means taking the time to create space for everything you own and probably purging away some clutter that’s making your goal more difficult.
Make at least one change to remove temptation from your environment to make room for success!