Did you have tall aims for what you’d like to change about your habits and routines in 2023 only to realize within a few weeks into the year that all your plans have been shot to hell? A friend of mine was calling it the new year curse – that he failed to keep up with the classes he took on starting January before the end of the month. It’s not just him, we’ve all been there. We start something new with all hope, optimism, and full energy, only to have life happen to us and our plans get sidetracked before we could say get set and go. Does that mean we stop planning? How can we have a better approach when we start anything new in our life? That’s exactly what we’re going to delve into today.
In this episode of the Own Your Everyday series, we will explore how to approach doing anything new in life.
Now that the fad of the new year new me is over and the new year curse is lifted, we can actually explore what it takes to take up something new and inculcate it in our lives. There’s a beautiful sutra in the yoga sutras where Patanjali shares how we should approach Yoga abhyasa in our lives which I think is relevant for everything we take up in life not just Yoga Abhyasa. The sutra says
1.14: sa tu dīrgha kāla nairantarya satkārā ‘‘sevito dṛḍhabhūmiḥ
Practice becomes firmly grounded when we engage in it for a long time, without break and with deep devotion (satkara).
1. Deerghakale – You have to do it for a long period of time – that’s not 1 or 2 days but months and years.
2. Nairantarya – without a break, without interruption, that means we are focused and stick with it without interruption. There’s an expansion of the word FOCUS i read on the internet that feels apt here it expands to – Follow One Course Until Success.
3. Satkara Sevito – With Deep devotion or respect to whatever it is we undertake. It’s not engaged in recklessly, but with respect, reverence, to whatever it is you’re hoping to inculcate.
If its a diet, a reverence to our physical bodies and why we set out on the path of healthy eating. Approaching everything we do with a sense of reverence, and divinity in it.
To really make something a part of us – we need to do all of this – invest in it for long periods, unwaveringly stick with it no matter how many u turns life takes us on, and be dedicated to the larger purpose and approach it with devotion. But life happens, health goes for a toss, work load intensifies, birthdays, weddings, travels happen and most of our good intentions get tossed out the window. So how can we really stick with it? Here are things that worked for me – Reflect on it, Experiment with it, and see what works best for you.
1. Start small
Don’t do it all at once. Begin with one small habit first, once that’s established, add other habits to it or expand it by doing more of it. So if you start with meditating, start with meditating for 5 or 10 mins. Do it for a few weeks, settle into a routine where that becomes part of your daily activities. Then, widen your morning routine by adding journaling to it or deepen your mediation practice by increasing it to 10-20 mins and slowly build that routine.
2. Keep it simple
I cannot emphasise this enough. You don’t want something complicated. Rather keep it simple and focus on repeatability. Restrict the number of items in your routine as well. 3-5 things together are ideal i.e 3 things for your morning routine, 3 things for your evening routine.
3. Review and modify as you grow
When I was more anxious and stressed, I’d spent 45 mins to 1 hour doing my yoga practices and meditation. Now that I’ve overcome that intense anxiety, I can manage to do my yoga for 20-30 mins and still feel the same calmness. On other hand, my current focus is to build my writing muscles, so now I try to write for 45-60 mins each day (I still fail miserably). Make sure to keep reviewing your routines every few months to keep tweaking it to serve you better for your current goals.
4. Remember your why
Staying consistent is often the hardest. We start many things but leave them half-baked cause whatever adrenaline or motivation we started with fizzled out within a few days/weeks.
The simplest trick for me to stay consistent is to be very clear of my why. Why am I doing this? Why is this important to me? What is the price of not doing this? What is the reward I might gain by doing this?
But the beauty of routines is that you only need all this inspiration and purpose when you are getting started. Once the new neural pathway is ingrained in your head, it starts to happen automatically. It’s like that well-oiled machine that will keep running. So be at it the first few weeks. Soon you’ll notice it happening on auto-pilot.
5. Reviving Routines
While we want to be consistent in developing habits and building routines, there might come a time when you falter on your routines. We are human after all. It happens. The key point is –
6. Don’t panic or beat yourself up.
We don’t want to fret over what’s already happened or talk ourselves down with harsh judgements. Both such actions put a dent in our confidence which is the opposite of what we are aiming for. So what do you do?
1. Accept that it happened.
2. See if you can avoid what caused you to break the routine in the first place and learn your lessons. observe what broke down where and if that’s something within your control or influence be more mindful of it.
3. Get back on track immediately. If you break your routine one day it’s no big deal. But most of us end up making a habit of breaking that routine. That becomes a challenge. Remember the cardinal rule “Never miss it twice” that way you’ll know you can always get back to it. ”
So here’s your own your everyday tip for this week, being consistent and building new habits and routines is no walk in the park. So aim for flexible consistency. When we aim for 100% consistency, we set ourselves up for failure. When we aspire for flexible consistency – that means we will do it – as much as possible – we allow room to miss 1 or 2% but get the 98% right. In the aim for the perfect 100, we stay at 0 all our lives, so let’s aim for progress and flexible consistency as much as we can. We start small, keep it simple and repeatable, make sure to never miss it twice, and keep remembering why you started in the first place. Why do you want to make this change happen in life? Why is this new habit or routine important to who you aspire to be? Remind yourself that everytime you tend to go off track and keep at it.
It’s challenging, but not impossible. There will be days where it will happen effortlessly, and days we just don’t feel like it. We just need to set our minds to it and make it happen no matter what.