Five Strategies That Might Be Just What You Need
Sometimes it takes a profound shift in mindset for someone to make a change in their work or life. An epiphany, a whole new perspective, maybe even hitting rock bottom.
And sometimes, it just takes a new trick.
For me, it was workout rollies. Every week I roll five stacks of workout clothes — pants, top, undies and socks — into five rolls and I line them up in a drawer like sardines. I can find them in the dark, and I often do because the first thing I do when I wake up is grab one and get dressed to work out.
And then, since I'm dressed for it anyway, I go out for a walk or a run.
It turns out the hard part of exercising, for me, isn't the exercise — it's finding the exercise clothes.
It's good to try stuff
Would I ever have predicted that? No. I would never have thought that one day I would exercise every day, just as soon as I figured out how to store my exercise clothes.
It's almost impossible to know, just by thinking about it, what's going to be the thing that falls into place and makes a new way of being possible.
That's why it's good to try stuff. Try stuff that you think might help, and try stuff that sounds pretty stupid.
I'm always trying stuff. Right now I'm trying a glass of water every morning (yuck), eating a hearty breakfast (yum), going to bed later (weird, I know), writing at any time of the day instead of getting hung up on "my best writing time" being in the morning (what?!), and closing my eyes to pay attention to my body when I feel bad.
So if you've reached a point in your life, where you want something different, you don't necessarily have to make big, melodramatic changes, and you certainly don't have to become a whole new person.
You might just have to try some stuff.
Some Stuff to Try
There are plenty of things to try out there in the world — specific, technical tactics like bullet journalling, and vague suggestions like "be more mindful".
Here are some of the things, somewhere between specific and vague, that have worked for me and my clients.
Decide once, act every day
Sometimes the hardest part of doing something is deciding to do it. If you do something occasionally, like a couple times a week, or "when you have a chance", you can spend so much time figuring out if today is the day (or making up some reason why it's not) that you don't have any energy left to do the thing.
It might just be easier to decide, today, that you're going to do the thing every day. Take the decision out of the tired and distracted hands of Future You, and make it now: I will floss every day. I will write every day. I will wipe the shower down every day. I will draw every day.
There's not really a downside, as long as you're not committing your future self to something that's gonna take hours every day. If it's something pretty straightforward, it should be fine.
And something magical happens when you do something every day — routine starts to become habit, and eventually you scarcely even notice it. It just gets done.
Chain up your habits
Developing a new habit can be hard, because you have to do it consistently for long enough that you do it without thinking. One of the hardest parts of developing a habit is getting it going in the first place, remembering that you're trying to do this thing.
Habit chaining — connecting a new habit to an existing one — can be a useful way to get a new habit started.
For example, if you want to floss every day, and you already brush your teeth every day, you can connect flossing to brushing your teeth. Tell yourself, "when I brush my teeth in the evening, I will also floss". (Do Future You a favour and make sure the floss is right there by your toothbrush.)
You might say to yourself, after I take a shower, I'll wipe the shower walls down; while I have my coffee in the morning, I'll do some sketching.
Not every new habit slips so easily into an existing routine. For example, writing takes time — flossing is a one-minute job, but you can't write much in one minute. But with some ingenuity you can probably chain a half-hour of writing to something in your day.
For example, a former client, an author, would leave early for work and write at a coffee shop for a while before going into the office. "On my way to the office, I'll stop at a coffee shop and write."
(This was particularly brilliant because she found a space to slip in her writing time where a lot of people wouldn't even see a space, in between her commute and the start of her work day.)
Give yourself a deadline
Habits and routines are great... until they aren't.
A while ago I worked with a client, a comic artist, who had been doing well with a steady routine of drawing for an hour a day. But when we worked together she was uninspired by that routine, and struggling to finish a comic.
In one of our conversations, she had the idea to give herself the deadline of finishing that comic by the end of the month. And in fact, she decided to finish that comic and another she'd been working on.
The deadlines were exciting and energizing, and she got the comics done in time to make unprecedented sales over the holiday season.
Personally, I don't do well with self-imposed and self-enforced deadlines — I happily let them whoosh by, just as I do with time blocks in my calendar.
But forcing my own hand by publically declaring something will happen — like, say, I'm going to run a group coaching program that will start at the end of March — is pretty effective.
My friend Stevonnie uses the classic trick of inviting people over to their place to force a deadline for house cleaning.
Enlist someone to hold you accountable
Accountability is super helpful. Apparently. For me, not so much — I am apparently entirely devoid of shame — but lots of people find it useful.
The power of accountability can be as simple as just having told someone you're going to do something. Putting your intentions into words can make them solid enough in your mind that you follow through.
And if that doesn't do it for you, telling someone about a deadline you have set (see above) can be helpful in nudging you to actually do the thing, so you don't have to confess that you didn't.
Casual accountability among friends can be a bit, well, casual for this. Getting someone to keep track of your goals and follow up is a big ask. It's all too easy for your friend to forget and for you to "forget", and the whole thing just fades into the mists of history.
That's where it's useful to try reciprocal accountability, where you both commit to something (the same action or a different actions, as long as you're both aiming for the same timeframe) and agree to check in on each other about it.
If that sounds like a lot for a friendship, you could hire someone. Like a coach.
Accountability is part of what you get with coaching — you tell your coach you're going to do something, and then the next time you meet you report back on whether you did the thing or not.
Plus, in coaching, if you didn’t meet your commitments you have the chance to figure out what got in the way and come up with a new strategy for the next go 'round.
Bring a friend: Body doubling
I have a friend — okay, several friends — who aren't great at housekeeping. A while back I was at the home of one of those friends, leaning on the kitchen wall and chatting while they loaded the dishwasher and cleaned the counters. I wasn't helping, I was just hanging out.
"It's a lot easier to clean up when someone else is here," they said.
"The magic of body doubling," I replied.
Body doubling is a technique that people with ADHD find helpful; it’s simply having someone else there while you work on something. They don’t help, supervise or check your work, they’re just there. But you don’t need ADHD for body doubleing to help. Humans often work better when we have company.
You don't even have to be there there. You can body double online — a client has had great success with Focusmate — or on the phone.
Body doubling is under-researched, so no-one really knows why it works yet. It might be that peer pressure keeps you focused; it might be that the other person's presence has a calming and focusing influence; it might be that the pleasure of having someone else around makes the task easier to focus on, or as in the case of cleaning the kitchen, adds enough distraction that the task isn't so boring.
(It occurs to me that it's typically reductive and Western-science-y to try and unbraid the reasons why people do well in the company of other people. My guess is that it's some combination of all those things, and also because people need people.)
Why ever it works, it works for a lot of people. It's one of the reasons I run an online co-working on Monday mornings — the body doubling helps me get through my weekly planning in under two hours, where it used to often take the whole day.
Above all, don't give up
I hope some of these strategies are helpful, and that one of them is just the thing you need to make the change you want. But if they aren't, I hope you don't give up. There are lots of other things you can try to tackle your goals. You don't have to become someone new — you just have to find the tricks that work for you.
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If you want to try body doubling yourself, or just start the week off with intentional commitment to your creative work, drop me an email and I'll add you to the notification list for (the) Monday Morning Creative Company, my two-hour online co-working meetup.