How much can you actually change your life in 12 months? A question I kept asking myself before starting my habit-change challenge.
How much can you actually change your life in 12 months?
That’s a question I asked myself often before I started my habit-change challenge on September 15th.
I’m curious whether I can change the whole structure of my life in a year if I do a few simple things every day (ideally without skipping) and build new habits.
Jim Rohn writes in “Vitamins for the Mind” that success is a few simple, correct actions that a person does every day, while failure is a few simple, wrong actions that a person keeps repeating.
However obvious this idea seems, realizing that you’re moving through life in the wrong direction can be very hard to accept.
Looking back at the last few years, I can see that I made certain mistakes in many areas of my life.
Above all in health: my diet, sleep and rest schedule, not enough physical activity, no quality weekends or vacations.
All of that combined has led to me weighing much more than I want — 96 kg instead of 88 kg. I developed atrial fibrillation. An ambulance took me twice. A few other health issues showed up too.
Health is affected both by my lifestyle and by my work — or more precisely, its pace.
Looking at my life as a whole, in the words of my psychologist: “For the last few years, you haven’t offered yourself anything new.”
I recorded a lot of videos, went on podcasts and interviews, ran consultations and courses, read books, grew my business.
I know that to a lot of people this lifestyle looks very appealing, especially considering that I do work I love.
But over time, especially if you don’t try something new and don’t take real pauses in what you do (long enough to actually miss it), even work you love deeply starts to feel routine, and you slowly lose motivation and interest.
That’s exactly why I’ve started building genuinely new things into my life: Spanish, evening runs, preparing offline events, working on community, writing a new book, and a few other things.
In this pursuit of change, I don’t want to lock myself into rigid discipline, where missing something on my list today means feeling disappointed in myself.
I consciously allow myself to enjoy life first, and only second try to check off every item in my habit tracker.
Right now, in the mornings I spend time on spiritual growth, exercise, reading, planning, and writing. And in the evening, after work, if I have time, I do the second part of my habit list.
That way, every day I feel a sense of progress and joy that, millimeter by millimeter, I’m improving my life.
How do you find balance between work, family, growth, and other areas of life? Do you like your life right now?