What is a resolution, really, if not a pledge to create a new habit for yourself? One resource that could help you is the new book Atomic Habits. Author James Clear provides a host of actionable tips to help you understand the behavior that creates habits and how to utilize that knowledge to develop new ways of action.
Like the one-second video that I wrote about yesterday, Clear recommends starting small and working toward a 1% improvement every day, for example, begin by doing just one exercise, and then on the next day add to it. By making your habit easy in the beginning, you are more likely to stay with it long enough for it to truly become ingrained in your behaviors.
And in this season of setting goals, Clear offers counterintuitive advice, suggesting instead to forget about goals and to focus instead on your system. “You don’t rise to the level of your goals,” he writes. “You fall to the level of your systems.” You need to develop systems to make it easy to achieve the behavior you want with consistency.
Instead of spending time developing your resolutions only to have them go by the wayside, perhaps a better use of your time is to invest in Atomic Habits – to learn how to create a system that allows you to transform all your habits in the new year.
