Change your habits: dealing with the rational
I recently read the book Switch by Dan Heath and Chip Heath, which gives tips about smoothing change in your life and making them stick (made to stick is their first book).
You can read my introduction from last week.
The first part is dealing with the rational part of yourself. Sometimes this part of us gets bogged down in researching and recording data, there are some ways you can get around this.
1. Look for what works. This could be habits you've instilled yourself over the years, how did you manage to keep those habits. But more than likely you need to look outside yourself. Talk to people you know or search the internet. The world wide web is full of blogs by people who have made any number of changes in their lives, and they are dying to help someone make the change.
Not everything everyone else has done will work for you, but you can try out any number of ideas.
2. Think small. Too often we see the big picture when we are making changes. What exact change are you going to make? This step is similar to making goals that are trackable.
In my life, my goal is to write more. That's a HUGE goal and if I stuck with just that ideal I would write occasionally and generally feel like a failure. So instead my goal is to write 500 words, 5 days a week. That is trackable. At the end of the day I can look at my word count tally sheet and see that I wrote 523 words more than yesterday.
3. What is the end result? Why are you trying to get the end result?
Again with my "write more" goal, that's not the real result I want. I want to finish a novel, or X number of short stories. Why? Because once I have a novel I can move one step closer to being published, or self-publishing.
I know many of my blog readers and people's whose blogs I follow are doing Row80 this round. I know Row80 follows many of the ideas in Switch.
How are your resolutions going this year? Could these ideas help you make a big change this year?
Tagged: Arts, Asrai Devin, Chip Heath, Dan Heath, Fiction, goal setting, goal tracking, goals, motivation, Online Writing, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, Word count, writers, Writers Resources, writing
