How many new year’s resolutions have you made over the course of your life? How many of them have actually stuck? If you’re like most people, the percentage is pretty dismal.
This year, do something different. Instead of resolving to change, resolve to make it a year of experiments. Take something you want to incorporate or explore – say, meditating, or visualization, or cutting out sugar – and do a 30-day experiment.
[Check out these twelve 30-Day Experiment ideas!]
Do it with the attitude that you’re going to explore it for 30 days and see what happens. See how it affects your life. See if it does what you’ve read it’s going to do. Make your life a learning lab. Take what works, leave what doesn’t.
It’s not a rigid approach. It’s being curious, jumping in and seeing what’s there. You don’t have to grasp for results. They’ll either come or they won’t.
Depending on what you’re exploring, one experiment may or may not have an impact on your life. But the cumulative potential could be huge.
Imagine simply making it a habit to do a different 30-day experiment each month. That’s TWELVE experiments a year! Now imagine that, to be conservative, eight of those twelve experiments don’t have much of a long-lasting effect. Math whiz that I am, I can tell you that that means there are four experiments that do.
And now, imagine doing that every year for the next ten years? Think that would make a difference in your life? Compare that to the cumulative impact of all the new year’s resolutions you’ve made over the last ten years!
The beauty of this approach is that a) it’s a lot easier to stick with something for 30 days than for the rest of your life, b) it gives the results of the experiments you do time to evolve and weave their way into your life (or not), and c) there is zero pressure for any individual experiment to “work.”
What experiments would you like to try in the coming year?
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Brought to you by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst TM
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I love this. Curt. Totally goes with my new approach – everything is a hypothesis – try, test, repeat; keep good; discard bad.
Larry recently posted..Strong Evidence for the Biological Basis for Massage Therapy
Larry, absolutely! I love the idea of looking at everything as a hypothesis. There’s so much we’re tempted to discount or dismiss out of hand because we don’t have the first-hand knowledge to say whether it’s valid or not.