I can’t help but think of my friend MaryLou Driedger when I think about blogging. She mastered the habit of regular writing years ago. For more than three decades, she wrote as a columnist for a large regional Manitoba newspaper, The Carillon, and she blogs daily. Oh; she writes books too!
When I asked her how she managed to accomplish such a commitment, she said, “Lots of practice.”
Depending upon whom you ask, establishing a new habit can take anywhere from two to eight months. According to James Clear, author of the popular book Atomic Habits, sixty-six days is a more realistic timeframe.
That might seem like a long time, but putting a new habit into place can be satisfying and well worth the effort. It builds a new level of confidence and provides a serious energy boost – especially if the new habit is something you’ve always wanted to do but never quite got around to, like blogging or writing your first book.
Perhaps now is be a good time to act. If you’re game, here are several ideas that might help:
- Don’t try to do everything at once. Only focus on developing one new habit at a time (for a possibility of five or six new habits each year), and if it’s a huge-leap habit, break it down into manageable steps. For example, if you want to establish the habit of meditating for twenty minutes each day and you’ve never meditated before, start small. Try two minutes, then five, gradually adding more time as your comfort level grows. I turned myself into a meditator using this approach.
- To make your new habit stick, consider attaching it to a current activity that is already habitual. If you want to do ten minutes’ worth of stretching each morning, think about what else is going on in the morning. Are you a coffee drinker? Great! Right after you turn the coffee pot on, stretch. By the time you’re done, your coffee will be waiting.
- Trust yourself and the process. Even if you happen to miss a day, by returning to your practice instead of lamenting your “failure,” you’ll stay on trajectory and your habit will eventually stick.
- Check out Atomic Habits for some fascinating insight into the brain and habit development.
- Another book worth reading: The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. (Yes, I know I’ve mentioned her book before, but it proved such a valuable resource for me and so many of my writing workshop students that I think it’s worth repeating.) The Artist’s Way is basically a twelve-week creative recovery process that includes daily journaling , what Cameron refers to as “the morning pages.”
There is no better time to begin developing a new habit than the moment you’re in right now.
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Photo by Danielle MacInnes and released through a CC0 license.