Happy New Year from Building Bridges Leadership! Did you set any New Year’s resolutions for yourself? If so, how are they going? If the answer is “not well,” you’re far from alone.
As we enter any new year, as many as 60% of us set resolutions. But – as you may be able to concur a week into the new year – researchers from the University of Bristol and the University of Scranton find that as few as 8% of us achieve our New Year’s goals. Perhaps, like me, you’ve stopped using January 1 as the starting point for new habits. You may have even become swept up in the Instagram and TikTok trend of called the Winter Arc (#winterarc), which encouraged people to start new health and fitness habits earlier than the New Year to build habits that would not be tied to the myth of “everything will be different in January”. Instead, the idea is that the habit is already in place and therefore less likely to fail.
The good news about the Winter Arc idea is that you can start it at any point; the “Winter” part of the name is helpful when thinking about building healthy routines when you’re not able to spend as much time outside, but the idea of the “Arc” is the key point: this is a habit you build for a particular time period, not forever (where it is almost doomed to fail at some point).
Five years ago, Building Bridges Leadership’s second ever blog post was titled “10 Minutes a Day is All it Takes“. While I now bristle at the “All it Takes” statement, I think there is still something important there. As I wrote in that piece, “Think of a dream or a goal you’ve had for years – personal or professional – that hasn’t come to fruition. Does it feel big? Overwhelming? The term “kaizen” – taken in modern times to describe continuous improvement through small incremental change – is usually applied in a systems-wide business approach. It can equally apply to your own personal or professional goals, though. No matter how busy your day is, you can devote ten minutes to making progress towards your goal. Set aside 10 minutes each day, and who knows where that will take you? (My own ten minutes each day of children’s writing [in 2019] led to the launch of a story podcast for kids!)”
Devoting ten minutes a day can be especially powerful with creative pursuits that feel out of reach during working life. Keeping yourself to ten minutes can be powerful too – it can leave you knowing exactly what you want to do next and build up excitement to get back to it the next day so you can hit the ground running.
An important component, as author James Clear suggests in his book Atomic Habits, is to stop looking at your results! Focus instead on your processes, the feeling you get from working on this in small chunks, and on the direction in which you’re heading. Atoms are the smallest building block known to man, and yet they are fundamental to the nature of everything. Clear suggests that “Atomic Habits” are related – they are tiny 1% changes we can make in our daily lives and routines that, over time, make a profound difference in the quality of our professional and personal lives.
This Week’s Tip:
Devote ten minutes a day to a creative project you have wanted to work on but been overwhelmed by. It might work best for you to find a regular time to slot in those ten minutes; this could be when you get home from work, after dinner, after the kids are in bed, or it could be that you get up ten minutes earlier than usual and slot it in then. Whenever it is, we can all fit in ten minutes. Then stop after ten minutes! Stopping will increase your likelihood to come back the next day. Plan to do this for a season (this could be six weeks, three months, or anywhere in between) rather than forever. When that end point comes up, if this is working for you, you can choose to re-up!
Try this out this week, and let us know what creative project you choose to work on! We’d love to hear from you. As always, you can subscribe to our feed here, or sign up for our weekly newsletter to get these articles directly in your inbox.
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