only engage

Making Tiny New-Year's Resolutions

In my last post, I fessed up about how my 2022 has gotten off to a stuttering start, and complained about how January is a lousy time to start a new resolution.

So what to do when you know you need to get going, but you’re feeling uninspired?

The other day I was listening to a podcast with author, podcaster, chef and entrepreneur Anna Vocino (whose Substack you should definitely subscribe to), and she talked about how, if you want to create something in the world, you can’t sit around and wait for inspiration.

Tired today? Feeling blah? Tough noogies. Do it anyway. We tend to think that inspiration, or at least motivation, is a precursor to action. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. There’s a couplet from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “Faust” (as translated by Irish poet John Anster) that gets quoted all the time:

What you can do, or dream you can, begin it,

Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it…

But I like the two lines that come after:

Only engage, and then the mind grows heated—

Begin it, and the work will be completed!

Only engage. In other words, do something. Your mind will be heated with inspiration in no time. That’s the secret that successful people know, that propels them forward while the rest of us sit here trying to figure out the perfect new year’s resolution.

make it tiny

One thing that can help us engage is the work of Stanford Professor BJ Fogg. His book Tiny Habits is an incredibly fun and insightful look at human behavior, and how we can use little hacks to get ourselves to build good habits and quit bad ones. I’m currently doing a class through Restore Health (shout-out to Coach Bizzy and Coach Cathy) that teaches Fogg’s technique.

Fogg uses the formula B=MAP. He says any Behavior is the product of three factors: Motivation, Ability, and Prompt. That is, we get Prompted to do something by a cue in our environment. If we’re Able to do it and have enough Motivation, we’ll do it.

There’s an inverse relationship between the last two, says Fogg. The less Ability we have to complete a task (ie, the more difficult it is), the more Motivation is required.

This is where his idea of tiny habits comes in. By shrinking the behavior down to its smallest possible form, you increase your Ability to do it regularly, even when you’re not feeling particularly Motivated. Want to start a workout habit? Commit to simply lacing up your sneakers once a day. Want to start writing? Commit to just picking up your pen once per day.

And guess what — often you’ll find that once you get the sneakers on, you might as well walk around the block. Or once you get the pen in hand, you can scribble out a page or two. This is the bait-and-switch of the Tiny Habits technique. Start by “only engaging,” and before you know it, you find that you’re a writer who exercises regularly.

my tiny workout

I used this technique just yesterday to get myself to work out. I’ve written before about Dr. Ben Bocchicchio and his SMaRT workout program. I love this program because it’s simple, research-tested and fun. But the real genius of the thing is that it only takes 15 minutes. It’s a form of resistance training (think weightlifting, or in my case, resistance-band lifting) that’s so intense, it doesn’t take much time to be effective (in fact, you can’t do it for much longer than 15 minutes).

So yesterday, when it was 24 degrees (10 with the wind chill) in my outdoor home-gym, I managed to convince myself to get out there and do just one exercise — a wall sit. By the time I finished that, I was inspired to pull out my resistance bands and run through the others, and before I knew it, my mind — and my body — had “grown heated” with the adrenaline rush of another all-out HIIT session. I got so excited, in fact, that I even got out my phone and made a cheesy Rocky-type montage:

I realized afterward that it was my eighth session of January — meaning I’d completed Dr. Ben’s prescription of two sessions per week for the entire month. And thus was born a New Year’s Resolution: keep the streak alive through all of 2022. I even hung a chart on the wall so I can track my progress. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes!

So I guess what I’m saying is, start. You never know what you’ll finish.