OLD HABITS DIE HARD
…AND TURN INTO GLITTERY, VEGAN UNICORNS
My friend Sara and I nerd out HARD about becoming better people. We egg each other on to manifest our goals and help each other recognize when we’ve made progress. Most our conversations are made up of giggly half-finished sentences:
“Did you finish that Mind Mastery podcast about—”
”Procrastination? No, not yet…”
”—HA! The irony.”
”Shuttup! I’ll get to it. YOU, have to listen to that audiobook Deep Work.”
”I read a summary, it was great.”
”Ughh, but the book is all about NOT taking shortcuts.”
And so on. We agree on how problematic New Year’s resolutions can be. Says Sara,
“My thoughts on New Years resolutions…are that they are not real...Resolutions are an arbitrary line in the sand you draw, ending up as one more way of being hard on yourself. I prefer to set habits one at a time or related habits together in a group.”
The New Year resolution trend is really silly in my opinion. My resolution - meditate more, use my phone less - is already pretty doomed. I find it’s much easier to make a resolution for the week, or the month, and go from there. I were to, say, cut dairy from my diet for a few weeks, it would be much easier to do so on the first day of the week, than on a random Tuesday or amidst the hedonistic haze of the weekend. Another cool way to organically work on goal-setting is to do it with the moon. New moons are a great time to set goals, whilst full moons are an ideal time to look back and take stock. I love getting together with friends when we do this, as it heightens the focus and you can hold each other accountable.
Sara is super hardcore and her life is basically one huge spreadsheet. So, when Sara wants to learn French, she integrates the goal into the following method:
“I made a notecard for every week (see right) and eventually 3 of the 6 habits became real things I do without thinking twice. One of the key habits I have finally started to do on autopilot is acknowledging and writing down 3 new things I am grateful for daily…This has heightened my awareness and made me very aware/sensitive of what I have and how lucky I am to have it.”
Gratitude is a wonderful way to attract more good into your life!
I’d rather celebrate my 2019 victories and shift my mindset for 2020 instead of worry about minutiae and impossible standards! I set big goals and chip away at them.
This year, I received this awesome little workbook called THE YEAR AHEAD and I have to say, I feel pretty freakin’ psyched about what’s to come! I loved drawing cute little pictures of the things I want (stick figure Liane gives inspiring talks. stick figure Liane chills in nature. stick figure Liane is in lo0ve. stick figure Liane sticks you the finger if you’re judging her goals).
If you’d also like to do the workbook, here it is. Enjoy!