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Let Me Help You Reach Your 2021 Goals

It's the start of 2021 and you're super motivated to hit all your new year goals. But it's time to put some cold hard facts out there - 80% of us will fail our new year goals. Why do so many of us struggle with making changes in our lives?

In this post it's my goal to make you the 20% who don't fail.

How to make your habit 100% Successful everyday

The answer to this may surprise most of you - it's to do less. Let me explain.

We've always been taught by our parents/teachers to be ambitious and to aim for the stars. Taking this approach is the main reason why most of us fail to meet our goals.

Imagine 19 year old Mark Zuckerberg aiming to build facebook to have 1/3 of the world as users and to be worth $600 billion dollars. Instead he started off facebook as a social network JUST for universities.

What if Jeff Bezos aimed to build Amazon out to be the global behemoth it is today with 1,125,300 employees with $280.5 billion in revenue.. per year...

Now these are extreme examples but certainly translate to how we tackle our own goals. Whether it be trying to meditate, become fitter or to lose weight.

We strive for ambitious goals that feel intimidating and as result never start or quit early and often.

Simply put, setting goals that aren't small are intimidating, if not now, then surely later when you're low motivation


2 years ago I set out to meditate for 10 minutes everyday. Sounds doable right?

Well it went great for the first week... but on the second week I dreaded thinking about having to sit down for 10 minutes to meditate, everyday, for the rest of my life!!

It felt like I was looking at the great wall of china.. simply no hope of making it across. As a result, I was hugely inconsistent and often skipped days or quit completely for months at a time.

This was a huge blow to my confidence - I couldn't even sit down for just 10 minutes each day, how could I expect myself to be able to achieve my other goals which felt more ambitious.

Not only was the goal intimidating it was really really difficult to do everyday. The monks made it look so easy, they would say, just meditate for 20 minutes each day and you'll be happy.

The difference is they've been meditating for years, of course it'll be a breeze for them.

How I made meditating for 10 minutes a habit

The secret to make meditating consistent was to start small. Instead of aiming for 10 minutes everyday, I aimed to meditate for 10 seconds only. The idea here was to make it less intimidating and to make sure I would never fail

The 3 amazing benefits of starting small include:

  1. Makes it easy to start - Starting small entirely removes the intimidation from starting a habit. Meditating for 10 seconds was not intimidating at all, even when I was tired.

  2. Constant Success - Starting small makes it almost impossible to fail, it was simply too difficult to not force myself to meditate - not such a bad problem to have. As a result I was always winning and this was huge for my self confidence. I felt a lot more confident in my ability to make other changes in my life.

  3. Identity Shift - After about 2 months of consistently meditating for 10 seconds, I began to shift my identity to someone who regularly meditates. Suddenly meditating wasn't so intimidating and so meditating for longer periods of time felt easier and more enjoyable.

After teaching the idea of starting small, some people have a lot of resistance to it. Common complaints are:

  1. But how will I achieve my goal if I start small?
  2. I feel like I'm cheating myself, I should aim higher!

This is exactly what I thought at first. I have all this motivation and I feel like I can aim for the stars, setting a goal to meditate for 10 seconds just feels wrong...

The first problem here is that we often over-estimate our abilities to make change AND how motivated we'll feel in the future - This is known as Affective Forecasting

Although we're good at predicting whether an experience will be good or bad, we aren't so great at predicting the duration and intensity of the emotion.

We do this all the time - a lead up to a presentation, an interview, a planned holiday; often we overestimate or underestimate our future emotions.

This applies very much to habits. Being motivated in the moment will make you feel as if you can do anything.

The second is how we view starting small. More often that not, we're told to go big or go home.

Goals that aren't small are intimidating and difficult to keep up with consistently when you're first starting out.

By starting small you'll ease yourself into this foreign behaviour and will show up each day without fail.

On the days where you feel extra motivated you'll be able to do more, but on the days where you're simply too tired, doing your baseline habit is perfect!

What you'll find is that you'll be constantly succeeding and never failing, simply because failing a small habit is near impossible. With this comes confidence in your ability to change and a small habit that changes your identity.

Success begets success.

Starting small is the first and most important step to building monumental habits that last a lifetime.

Free 1-1 Coaching for Habits

Hopefully this post helps out. This isn't a complete guide but it's enough to help you build bullet-proof habits.

On that note, I want to end this article with some good news - I'll be doing free 1-1 coaching calls this month!

There will be no sales pitch, no up-selling, I'll just be listening to the challenges that you're facing with building/breaking habits & maybe even give some advice that has helped me and others.

I've built a 10 minute meditation practise, I take cold showers every morning, I read a book every week, I also run a business that makes over 6-figures every year (www.pixeltrue.com), and I credit my current successes to building good habits.

If you'd be interested, here's a link to sign up for a free call - https://calendly.com/habits-with-andy/free

I hope you've found this useful and if you'd like to learn more about how to build good habits feel free to check out my blog

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