Minor Habits Major Results
Many people believe change is hard. The message from the media is that developing new habits takes months or years, and then they don’t stick. We go back to old, unwanted behaviors that don’t serve us well. The good news is that you can create minor habits and expect major results.
You might have monumental habit changes in mind, but when you tackle them step by step, you stand a good chance of turning them into a reality.
To reach any physical destination in life, you need to cover the areas between where you are and where you want to go. Whether you take a piecemeal approach by foot or travel by airplane, your journey entails traversing the middle ground.
Similarly, personal development and life improvement journeys involve increments until you reach success.
Minor habit changes might appear insignificant, but they inch you closer to your goals. Making small adjustments to life is far easier than stretching yourself to your limits. People often quit striving to reach their goals when they aim to get to their destination too fast. They expect to travel from point A to point Z in a few days, weeks, or months.
Realistically, change can take time. You probably won’t develop massive new habits in a flash. But you can gradually shift your life and behavior in the right direction and achieve your aims.
How to create minor habits
Have you ever considered how habits grow? You carry out small behaviors and doing so gets embedded in your psyche when you repeat your efforts. You generate neural connections in your brain that tell you to continue the actions on autopilot.
Mostly, your habits evolve without your awareness. Sometimes, they are helpful. But at others, they detract from your well-being. However, you can build constructive habits on purpose without too much hard work.
First, identify a new habit to build. Consider a major outcome, like losing a stone in body weight: this is your destination. Now imagine you have reached your goal and work backward. Look at the doable minor steps it might have taken to get there.
If you thought on a large, undoable scale, you might imagine you gave up two meals a day and existed on lettuce. Your approach would have been unworkable, though, because it entailed skipping the middle ground.
If you created minor habits toward weight loss, you could meet your aims in a subtle, almost imperceptible way. The small steps taken might have involved swapping your large dinner plate for a medium-size plate for two weeks before adding another step to your journey.
The next step could entail cutting out between-meal snacks on weekdays and reserving them for weekends. If you kept eating from a medium-size plate and only ate snacks on Saturdays and Sundays, you would begin to lose weight.
After a few more weeks, you might have added a third step to your weight-loss journey and swapped unhealthy Saturday snacks with healthier alternatives, and so on until you reached your destination.
You can apply the minor habit change for major results journey to any goal. Perhaps you want to improve your relationships by becoming a better listener. Or you may choose to start your own business or develop the habit of keeping fit.
Take a step-by-step approach and create minor habits that inch you toward your goals. You’ll reach your destination painlessly, and when you look back, you’ll be surprised at how easy it was to change for the better.
