The Power of New Beginnings
We all have things that we want to achieve. Small things like getting up without hitting snooze and big things like making a massive career change. We are most inspired to make these changes at the start of a new year or after a major life event. Yet, many of us struggle to make changes in our life for the long term.
This can happen for a multitude of reasons. In some cases this is because we take on too much, fail to plan out what we’ll need to be successful, or rely on our motivation to keep us going when all we want to do is throw in the towel. Research shows that 80% of new year’s resolutions are given up within two weeks. Often, these resolutions are the resolutions that were set the previous year.
When asked, most people will not be able to clearly cite why their failed at their goal. They wanted it badly, it had been something they had been struggling with and absolutely had to make a change. All of these reasons sound like recipes for success, so why did they still fail?
For others, they know exactly why their failed. They committed to do too much, too fast. They put themselves on a strict schedule with specific things that they needed to do every day. They broke down their goal into tasks and they put them on their calendar to keep them on track. This also sounds like a recipe for success so why too did they fail?
These are all challenges I’ve faced until I created the process I will be sharing over the next month. It is a mixture of insights from behavioral psychology, cognitive and learning sciences, and design thinking to name a few. While I am not formally trained, many years of failing — and hopefully failing forward — has taught me strategies that can have a tremendous impact on your success.
The first two things you need to get your head around are the concepts of new beginnings and journeys. Both are central to achieving your goals and becoming the best version of yourself.
New Beginnings
In the book When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, Daniel Pink highlights the power of new beginnings. For many of us we use “temporal landmarks” that are either social (New Year’s Day) or personal (an upcoming milestone birthday) as a moment to begin working on a goal. These landmarks give us the ability to disassociate ourselves from our past selves and to step back and look at the bigger landscape of our lives.
These temporal landmarks can even be arbitrary in nature. It can be the first day of a new month or a special date. The important thing is that they are important to you. When I was looking to begin achieving two of my goals — writing and exercising daily, I chose July 1st as my temporal landmark. While the date has no social significance, I gave it significant personal significance. It was halfway through the year and since we celebrate our U.S. Independence Day in July, I saw it as a way to break free from the barriers that had been holding me back and celebrate my own independence from them.
To make July an even stronger temporal landmark, I conducted a mid-year review looking back over the past six months. While I had set out to accomplish amazing goals at the beginning of the year, work had brought a considerable work load and personally I had been struggling with extreme fatigue from Hashimoto’s. The two combined to create a situation where doing the minimum was nearly impossible, let alone going after new goals. Two months later, COVID-19 hit and the goals went out the door.
My mid-year review gave me perspective that I had been missing up until that point. Prior to the review, my only perspective had been that I was a failure. The review reminded me that there had been some pretty major events that I could not have anticipated that took me off track. At the time, these events felt more like I was being run into a ditch, but time had made me forget how impactful some of these things had been on my daily life.
Journeys
This brings me to the second mindset that will have tremendous impact on your success — journeys. When we create goals we are most often focused on an end result. We want to weigh a certain amount or be able to run a certain time or distance. By focusing on the end result, we fail to see the power of the journey that we are on and how far we’ve come so far.
By changing our mindset to focus on the journey, we take our focus away from a narrow target and can now better recognize the variety of successes that we are having along the way. For example, if you had the goal of running a half-marathon by a certain date and failed, it would be easier to write yourself off as a complete failure. However, if you take it from the perspective that you went from not being able to run at all to being about to run a solid seven miles without stopping, you can see the wins you’ve made.
Seeing your goal as a journey enables you to adopt a mindset of experimentation and recalibration. In this mindset, your focus is on learning and progress, rather than seeing yourself as a failure. When we set goals, we all have the expectation that we are going to be on a straight trajectory of improvement.
In our half-marathon goal, we expected to continue building endurance, taking longer and longer runs until we reached our goal. We made really good progress the first month, getting up to running a mile without stopping. What we didn’t account for is that we started running with the wrong kind of shoes which led to us having sore arches and shin splints. We then had to stop running for a period of time to let our injuries heal. Not long after we started back we caught a cold and then had a big project that took up our nights and weekends. We simply didn’t know what we didn’t know, and in some cases couldn’t have anticipated.
Take this same situation when we have a journey mindset. We see that we went from not being able to run to running for a full mile. We also see that we learned the importance of having the right type of shoe for our gait. Finally, we learned that we had to find alternatives to long runs when our schedules didn’t allow for them or when a chest cold made it hard to breathe. By finding alternatives like lifting weights and stretching, we continued to focus on getting better. All combined, these moments of learning actually made ourselves a better runner less susceptible to injury.
For the next 30 days, I plan to share my approach to helping you get better at anything you want to achieve. We’ll break down the process into easy-to-do daily actions focused across five key areas:
- Knowing Yourself
- Creating Goals
- Adopting Mindsets
- Embracing Habits
- Practicing Self-care
I look forward to going on this journey with you and will leave you with this quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald that has always inspired me.
