An Experiment in Change | lostconfessions's Blog

2012 was a bit of a crazy one for me. It started as one of the best years of my life in a long time, and ended pretty much the opposite. I hope 2013 will be better.

I was never big into New Year Resolutions - didn't really believe in them. But I have been thinking about trying to change my life around for a while now, and I think that the start of a new year is as good a time as any.

I thought about the areas of my life that I wanted to change. I covered many areas of my life - lifestyle, physical health, emotional health, work, friends, relationships, finance, hobbies and pastimes....anything I could think of. I thought about things I wanted to buy and things I wanted to do. I pictured who I would like to be and how I would like to live. I tended to focus on REALISTIC goals. Goals I could actually see myself achieving.

Then I began to work backwards. I began to figure out the steps that I needed to take to achieve my goals.

Some of the steps were easy. Some were hard. Some needed money. Some didn't. Some steps required the breaking of a habit, or the creation of a new one. Some steps just required a one-off effort.

I began to focus on the easiest steps first. The smallest. They say that success breeds success and I reckoned that accomplishing the small things would give me confidence to begin work on bigger ones.

I took some of the easiest steps of the most important goals. The most important goals were to lose weight, to regain control of my sleeping patterns and energy levels, and to tidy up my life.

Some of the steps require me to form new habits. For example, in order to lose weight, I decided that I would need to start having a regular walk. But I HATE walking. I am too tired to do it when I get home from work. And I find it hard making the time to do it. So I decided to take a walk during my work lunch hour. And I decided that if I managed to do it for 30 consecutive work days, at the end of that period I would probably have "learned" that habit without having to make a conscious effort to remember to do it. This would help me free up my effort for talking other steps.

Other habit forming steps included:

• 
  Taking no beer on weekdays for a month


• 
  Keep a clean inbox for 30 days - learning to deal with mails as they came into my inbox


• 
  Getting up at 7am every morning on weekdays for a month - no snooze button


• 
  Getting to bed before 11.30pm every evening on weekdays for a month- no more sitting up till 2 am

I am tracking my progress on these steps. If I can manage to get in the habit of doing them after a month, I will choose another few to work on.

I am interested to see whether this plan works out or not.