Building New Habits for the New Year

With a New Year come new resolutions. And while I really despise “resolutions” it’s also essentially just building new habits, which I love. So let’s talk about an easy way to incorporate habits into your day by stealing mini moments that we can add them into.

Building New Habits with Mini Moments Transcript

For an extra episode today, we’re going to continue this discussion about the Plan It Forward and setting focuses for the new year.

I want to go ahead and give you some ammunition against that sneaky little part of our brain that’s going to say, “we don’t have time for this”, because none of us have time, right? That’s the reason I think you listen to this podcast.

We don’t have enough time between being a teacher and a mom, and all of these things that we have to do that are added into our daily plate. When are we supposed to add in actually spending time focusing on a focus?

Well, that’s where I’m going to challenge you to doing some mini moments.

Building New Habits with Mini Moments

Mini moments is this little phrase that I’m going to coin about the downtime in our day that we’re kind of just wasting.

If you go back to the habit stacking episode, I gave you some examples of how you can extend your time by taking advantage of some of those less demanding, less mental tasks. I want you to start out, whenever you choose to start your new focus (whether it is on January 1st or not), start out by just taking advantage of any mini moment you can find to build new habits.

We are going to start somewhere, and as soon as we start and we add into it, over time, you’re going to realize that these mini moments are adding up.

Maybe you can only find a couple minutes a day in the beginning, and by the end, you realize you’ve added up hours and hours of time spent doing even the smallest tasks to inch you towards the long term goal that you have.

Let’s just take for example, maybe the most traditional of all New Year’s resolutions, and say that you want to live a healthier life. Usually that involves some sort of adding an activity, adding in cooking meals from scratch. We are changing everything about ourselves and trying to do it overnight and trying to make our schedule fit with this new person we think we need to become.

There are so many mini moments throughout the day where we can actually sneak in some of these activities. I mean, have you ever just sat at the copier, staring at it as it prints out all of your copies one by one? What if you did some squats, I mean, behind closed doors, obviously.

Maybe we can do some grading standing up and walking around to get some extra steps in. I know we get a lot of those in, but it can’t hurt.

One time, I did my grading between all of my different tables, and I made myself lunge to each of them. That was a weird but successful option.

Even times like when you were in the pickup line waiting for your kids, you’re sitting in your car, we could…just stick with me here for a second…you could put a hand weight in your car, and you could do some sort of aerobics while you wait.

Nobody else is paying attention. Everybody else is just staring at their phone. But you? You’re going to be watching a YouTube video while you do some curls…if that’s your thing. I hope you catch my drift.

We have so many pieces of downtime that we don’t recognize throughout the day to add in small, mini ambitious tasks. Throughout a day, if you were to time all of the actual time you spend not doing them, you’d find out that they add up.

That’s the same thing with some of these fitness challenges where they say, “I did 100 sit ups a day for 30 days.” They didn’t do them all at once. They broke it up throughout the day. You’re still getting the impact without the time commitment that we feel like we have to have.

It’s the approach I had to take when I started taking on my masters. They want 10 to 20 hours a week devoted to my master’s program. Well, that’s going to have to come while we’re at gymnastics. It’s going to have to come in the pickup line. That time is going to have to be stolen away while I’m eating my lunch. It comes from all of these different places, but in the end, the result is still there.

So I challenge you to find some mini moments and to start incorporating small tasks that help you towards your focus for the new year.

Let me know how building new habits go! Until next time.