Making a permanent behavioral change in your life is challenging, to say the least. Most changes don’t stick, or they fade away after a few months. Occasionally, people do transform their lives, and it usually starts with one small change that snowballs into others. That kind of transformation is inspiring to witness in others or experience in your own life.
While most attempts at meaningful change fail, it’s usually because people aren’t aware of the best practices. However, with the right approach, you can significantly increase your odds of success.
Failure runs high as many people overcomplicate the matter. It’s easy to imagine that, because change is hard, you need a complex solution, but actually, simplicity is the key. Two main factors come into play: self-awareness and focused effort.
Self-Awareness: By self-awareness, I mean a recognition of your own patterns, habits, and limitations. Without knowing yourself, it’s hard to map out a plan that actually works. When you know yourself, it’s easier to shoot down bad ideas, leaving the odds in your favor.
Focused Effort: Concentrate your energy on as few ideas as possible. Since very few attempts at change work—when you try to change more than one thing at a time, the potential for success drops to nearly zero percent.
We can grow our self-awareness through a life audit.
6 Tips for Auditing Your Life in the New Year
We can significantly improve our self-awareness simply by asking ourselves the right questions and reflecting on our lives in a productive way.
1. Compare Last Year’s Goals to Your Actual Accomplishments
When it comes to change, a little realism goes a long way. What better way to ground yourself in reality than to reflect on how much you changed this past year? Did you make progress toward the goals you had set for yourself? Knowing this and your base rates of success from previous goals should help you to calibrate how ambitious or conservative to make your next set of goals.
2. Track How You Spend Your Time for 1 Week
It’s likely that your perception of how you spend your time is off. Many studies have shown that people aren’t very good at estimating details, such as how many calories they take in or how long a project will take. It’s likely the same with where your time goes—and probably leans toward a manner that makes you feel better about yourself.
3. List Your Recurring Obligations and Decide Which Should Continue
Just as people lose track of their paid subscriptions and end up paying for them longer than they’re useful, it’s easy to do the same with your commitments. Because you’re never thinking about them all at once, they can blend into a giant, undifferentiated heap. Writing them down on one sheet of paper forces you to contemplate them.
4. Examine How Often You Act on Impulse Versus Intention
This one is challenging at first, because it’s a process that acts in the background of your life. At times, you act intentionally toward something you set out to do, and other times, you impulsively chase a whim. With a bit of self-priming, you can begin to take notice of your inner world and learn to recognize your patterns. It might help to carry a notebook or an app to track each time you act impulsively throughout the day.
5. Note Any Friction in Your Physical Environment
One of the most effective ways to use self-discipline is not to try to force yourself to do things you don’t want to do, but rather to shape your environment in advance to support your efforts. As you go through a typical day, pay attention to the various points of friction that slow you down. The key is to remove friction for things that bring you closer to the person you want to be, and add friction in the opposite direction. We often vastly underestimate how much a little inconvenience shapes behavior over the long term.
6. Identify Decisions You Continually Postpone and Why
One of the great bottlenecks of human behavior is indecision. Delayed choices become a psychological weight we haul around from day to day. Our avoidances become less desirable, leading to even greater aversions. In the same way that exposure therapy helps people overcome everyday fears, it’s important to recognize the fears that surround decision-making and intentionally expose ourselves to them every day. You’ll soon find that their hold over you isn’t nearly so strong.
Taking stock of your life as it is now is an ideal starting point for guiding yourself toward more productive, positive, and healthy changes.