Habits and Change (and Shortcuts)

Waking up early or being on time or taking 30 minutes for yourself (all commitments of time) work with mixed results.

But when you get up at 5am for a year, you hardly need an alarm clock. That’s a habit. It’s etched into your sleep patterns.

The habit of being on time means you’ll most likely be on time for your meeting. Habits are hard to break; in this case, “on time” is programmed into your biological clock.

30 minutes of self-care everyday for 100 days means on day 101, it’s virtually a guarantee. Because, well, it’s a habit.

Pick one thing. Just one. Not two or eight or 15. Just one.
I mean small. Really small. And achievable.
Commit to it.

And do it 10, 20, 30 times in a row. That’s a win. And probably a habit now.

Now, onto the next thing.

Lasting, large-scale change begins with short, small-scale habit-making.

That’s a way of saying, of course, there are not shortcuts to change. If you don’t have the time to form a habit that sticks, which is an incremental investment into a much larger transformation, you definitely don’t have the time to go back and start over after the shortcut proves wasteful.