Or, to be more contemporary, a Motivational Meme. Memes are phrases which can be motivational, funny, or thought-provoking.
Memes tell us to “go for it,” “take the leap,” “jump and figure it all out on the way down.”
Easy to say. Sometimes hard to do.
Statistics show that by this time of the year, most New Year’s Resolutions have failed or have been abandoned. This can leave a stinging sense of failure. What happened? Can I not change? There was so much enthusiasm back on December 31st...
Good news! We recently came across four key principles for approaching change, for the better.
In a recent article in Fast Company, written by Belle Beth Cooper, “How I Became a Morning Person, Read More Books, And Learned a Language in A Year" the author (like so many of us) tried to improve her life, but set goals strikingly different from her current life practices. These goals became mountains of defeat rather than climbs of success.
So she scaled down her goals and changed her approach. Here are four basic principles for achieving goals as taken from the article:
1. START SMALL: REPEAT A TINY HABIT DAILY
When I first started to focus on building healthier habits a few years ago, one of the biggest mistakes I made was to ask too much of myself.
The distance between where I was starting and where I wanted to be was so great that I would fail a lot. And each failure made it harder to succeed the next day.
2. FOCUS ON ONE HABIT AT A TIME
One of the hardest things for me when it comes to building new habits is to not take on too many at once. I always have such grand plans for the things I want to get better at, and so much enthusiasm when I first start out, that I want to build several habits at once.
Every time I’ve tried that approach, I end up failing. Usually a few of the habits don’t stick, but sometimes none of them do. It’s just too much to focus on at once—a bit like multitasking, where your brain has to switch contexts constantly, because you really can’t focus on multiple things at once.
So my new rule is to work on just one habit at a time. Only when that habit is so automatic I can do it every day easily do I start on a new habit.
3. REMOVE BARRIERS: HAVE EVERYTHING YOU NEED AT HAND
I find it much easier to complete my habits when the equipment I need is at hand. For instance, having my phone in my hand already while drinking coffee made it easier to build a habit of doing a quick French lesson at that time. Reading a page of a book every night became a lot easier when I kept the book by my bed.
4. STACK HABITS: BUILD NEW ROUTINES ONTO EXISTING ONES
One of my favorite ways to build new habits is to stack them onto existing habits. This builds up several habits into a routine, and each habit acts as a trigger for the next one.
The cool part about this is you already have lots of habits you probably don’t realize. Brushing your teeth before bed, getting out of bed in the morning, making coffee at the same time every day—these are all existing habits. As long as you do something at the same time every day without thinking about it, it’s a habit you can stack others onto.
These habits are like stretching. A little bit everyday becomes a healthy habit that allows you to gain more freedom in movement, and distance from chronic pain like Sciatica and Piriformis Syndrome.
That “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” quote now makes even more sense.
Small steps. Big leaps.
Stay Healthy!
Your Friends at Miracle Stretch
