Changing habits and creating new habits are both incredibly difficult. It takes a lot of practice, and, at least for me, a lot of failures.
Missteps and setbacks are frustrating, but you just have to keep plugging along until the habit takes hold.
New habits seem to be a little easier for me to form than changing old habits. As an example, making my daily gratitude journal a habit took about a month or so. On the other hand, some of my food habits took years to change. Thankfully, once they started to change, further changes became a little easier.
I’ve found that starting small is much more effective for me. Currently, I’m trying to make writing a daily habit. I’ve been trying off and on for about a year, mostly off. Most of that time, I was setting expectations too high for myself, so looking back it’s not a surprise that I failed.
I made it 6 days in a row last week, then missed Sunday. I was a little disappointed when I went over my daily to do list and didn’t get to check off “write”. But I can either give up or start again, and giving up certainly won’t add to my happiness. I got right back to it on Monday.
As sort of a minimal base, I try to write about my daily runs on the same day. Keeping up with that certainly helps. As much as I would like to dive in and get 1000-2000+ words all toward a couple projects I’m working on, I know that diving into the deep end like that will likely result in another failure and another setback. That said, if I get in the flow and the words start just pouring out, I’m not going to force myself to stop.
Another thing I’m working on, which I have a feeling is going to be a long-term project, is reducing procrastination. This one has been incredibly difficult. I’ve found that I have to start really small. It might be something as simple as telling myself that I will feed my dogs after this Youtube video is over without getting sucked into the next one. I still often struggle with tiny things like that, or telling myself that I’m going to work on packing and shipping things I sold on eBay at a certain time. Then trying not to get wrapped up in something else and rationalizing that it can wait because the post office doesn’t close for a few hours. I’ve become pretty good at rationalizing my procrastination.
Sometimes I find myself thinking that it’s not really that important if I do these little things right away as long as I get to them sometime. (Although, Sigurd certainly won’t let me forget when it’s time to eat.) To overcome the negative self-talk, I have to remind myself that if I hold myself accountable for the little things, it’s going to make it easier to not procrastinate on the bigger, more important things.
It takes practice, sometimes a lot of practice. If you’re having trouble at one level, maybe step back and think about dropping it down a level. It takes some of the pressure off.
As Jim Rohn said, “Make measurable progress in reasonable time.” With my experience in other areas, I know that, as long as I continue stringing together small successes, I’ll get to where I want to be. It may take a week, or it might take a year.