Change the Pattern … Crush Your New Year’s Resolutions
So … what if the next time you get a new device, you decided to learn everything you could about it for 10 days? What if you read blogs, took tutorials, watched user videos and experimented with it endlessly without settling into any habits?
What would the next three years with that device look like? Better for sure. You’d be smarter, more efficient, more satisfied and get far more value out of it than usual.
But that approach only works if you’re willing to suspend habits for the first 10 days and resist the drive to make everything easy and predictable.
Enough about devices.
Now the big question:
What if—for the first 30 days of 2016— you refused to settle into a pat routine with each of your key goals for the year?
I’m convinced that one of the enemies of progress is routine. We are creatures of habit, but our habits (repeated patterns of behavior) often take us to places we don’t want to go.
It takes 21 days to make a new (and better) habit. Add a week or so to it and you’ll have an ingrained pattern.
What would it look like if for the first 30 days of 2016 you launched a radical assault on the status quo?
What if:
You downloaded a new alarm app and set it for 5:30 a.m. and made no excuses?
You changed your meeting schedule so you could do something active five out of seven days?
You cut the number of meetings you participate in by half?
You moved to a fixed calendar to usher in a far better use of time next month? (I explain how to do it and why a fixed calendar is so awesome here.)
You changed grocery stores and had to learn a new pattern of shopping—and you just never went down the chip aisle?
You used smaller plates for 30 days as a way to cut back portion size?
You gave away $50 a week you’re currently spending on yourself?
You changed your study practice when it comes to message prep and ran every message through these seven filters each week before you deliver it?
You picked up a new Bible (or got a new Bible app or reading plan) and never missed a reading for 30 days?
You decided to not speak a critical word to your family or friends, and every day just prioritized doing it?
You took a new route to and from work to give you more thinking time?
You can fill in the blanks for whatever you need to conquer, but you see the pattern, right?
Rethinking your patterns for the first 30 days of 2016 will set the pattern for how you spend the next 335 days of the year.
Your desire to domesticate the new year and make it predictable and ‘easy to use’ runs deep, and it will lead you to exactly where this year led you unless you attack that pattern.
2016 will be exactly like 2015 unless you intentionally change it.
