Habits over Goals
Today marks 5 months since we first arrived in Budapest, and it’s been nothing like what we imagined, and yet we've changed and grown in so many ways that we truly do treasure. We moved here after feeling a beckoning in our souls to go and do something about the wrongs in the world. We made it a goal to get to Budapest and it has been such a fulfilling year actually doing what we spent 4 years planning and preparing to do. The pinch is that getting here was only the beginning of the whole journey towards creating change, and a lot of that change has to occur inside of us before ever occurring outside in our new community. The first issues we have faced have been issues of character, stress management, and the tight hold of deeply rooted fears.
Looking forward to 2022, I came to the realization that in order to live this year with the most integrity, I needed to bite the bullet, face up to some long-term demons, and clear the hallowed ground upon which I had placed them. It’s untidy though.
When stress is involved, we tend to revert to basic instincts or deeply rutted patterns of behavior. Some of these are good for survival, such as sourcing food, finding a place to live, making a home, building a support structure, etc. But some of those patterns that we can build our lives around are also bad. For me, it’s been in exaggerating those survival instincts by overeating, retail therapy, Netflix binging, angry passionate rants, and being generally judgmental of those closest to me. In small doses, we can view these things through rose-tinted glasses because in smaller moments of stress a good round of KFC will generally do the trick. Well, it puts me to sleep, which actually does the trick. But when daily living becomes 24/7 stress and survival, it becomes less manageable to eat KFC whenever I’m stressed, and actually creates a snowball effect of bad times. In the same way, small rounds of retail therapy could be seen as good when they’re not emptying the bank account every second day, and Netflix binging might be ok when your favorite show comes back after a couple of years, but it doesn’t leave a good taste when it’s happening every evening. My husband says I exaggerate, but you get the picture.
It’s big talk, I know.
But in the beautiful words of the talented Annie Dillard, “How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.” So I took a closer look at how I spent my days, and it was truly eye-opening. The thing is, these automatic habits that I had fallen into were actually stealing time away from me and causing me to rush with the things that deserved a good amount of time. I was becoming far too busy because I was actually being wasteful. So now with 2022 nearly upon me, I decided to take some of those deeply rooted bad patterns and start replacing them with daily habits, with the hope that when exaggerated, these good habits would bring good results and not turn into huge snowballs of overwhelming anxiety. The clarity I needed was that I came to the realization that if this behavior was not good at its most exaggerated then was it ever really good? Could it have been holding me back all along but it was just in smaller doses so I let it?
I ended 2021 by reading Atomic Habits by James Clear and one of the absolute game-changing quotes for me was this:
A slight change in your daily habits can guide your life to a very different destination. Making a choice that is 1 percent better or 1 percent worse seems insignificant in the moment, but over the span of moments that make up a lifetime these choices determine the difference between who you are and who you could be. Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations."
And with some of the other tools in this book, I started to add in small habits that seem insignificant, but hopefully over the course of twelve months will yield big changes. And for some sort of accountability and also to encourage you, here are some of my smaller habits I put in place:
Make my bed every day.
Do my small Bible reading plan every day.
Track my eating, even if it’s a bad day.
Read a book a week.
The trick I’ve found is that by adding in enough good stuff, I find myself running out of time and/or desire to do the negative things. And over time, the desire to walk that well-beaten track back to old behaviors becomes less and less attractive. I know it’s January 6 and I’m in the front end of things, but I’m hoping that by the end of the year I can look back and see some real growth and change. Would you like to join me? I’ve put together this really small list of tips if you’re wanting to start with me:
Start small. James Day advocates for 2-minute dedications. Wanna work out? Start with 2 minutes on your bedroom floor. Anything more and you won’t stick with it.
Make the changes specific. Don’t just say “Eat better”. Really nail in what exactly you’ll be doing to eat better. For example, a better way to write down that change would be, “Eat 5 servings of fruit/veges daily”.
Think of the person you want to be in a year, 2 years, 10 years, and break it down into habits that you could be working on now.
Have a bad day and fall off the wagon? Get back on and keep moving. One bad day is fine. 10 bad days is getting harder to overcome and 30 bad days is now a lifestyle.
If you’re looking at starting, I would love to hear from you, so feel free to write some of your habit ideas below in the comments section or flick me an email. And all the best as you look forward into 2022! Before you go off and stress about how to make your life better, let me leave you with this beautiful quote from John Mark Comer, “The solution to an overbusy life is not more time. It’s to slow down and simplify our lives around what really matters.” May you be able to take some time to craft your life around the things that really matter, and be truly able to leave the rest.
