If you’re making New Year’s resolutions, here’s a fun exercise. It starts with a favorite saying of mine: “How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.” To change our lives, then, we should change how we spend our days…not necessarily by moving to Bermuda, but by changing small daily habits that add up to the sum of who we are.
- To do this exercise, sit down, open a blank document, and start answering this one question: What does my AVERAGE day look like?
Describe in detail how you spend your morning, what you do mid-day, what you eat, what routines you have at work, how your evening usually goes. “I usually wake up around 6am. Then go make coffee and read for 30 minutes. Then I do 10 reps of my weights. Then go into my office and start work. I start with email. After working about an hour, I get some breakfast, usually toast with jam, bacon, and an egg with cheese.” Keep going like that. Be honest.
- When you’re finished, consider just 1 or 2 places you could make small changes that would add up to the biggest differences in your life.
For instance, if you wanted to lose weight, could you cut out the toast and bacon in the morning? (Reducing your calories by 250 per day can result in around 26 pounds of weight loss in a year.) Or if you wanted to change your work results, maybe you could put off answering emails until you’ve done something more rewarding first.
The idea is to change something small — to tweak something that moves you towards a goal. I hope this helps you have an even Happier New Year! ~Valerie