How to achieve ALL your resolutions

There is a big chance that this time of the year, like every year you are thinking about 2019 in a hopeful exciting way. A new year means a new start and in our minds it means a new opportunity to do and become all the things we have been wanting to do and become for the last 10 years of our lives, including:

• Get in better shape
• Eat healthier
• read more books
• Learn something new (maybe to code? 😉 )
• Start your own business.
• and so on..

Here I will show you the most effective way to achieve it ALL!

First, I invite you now to write all the things you have been wanting to do or become:

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Go ahead and get a piece of paper or notebook to write them all, with no order, keep writing all the things you would like to have done or become by December 2019 .

Done?

Sure?

Well I will trust you have written them all down and continue..

So now you have to choose your top <10 (at most 10) resolutions for 2019, and order them in order of urgency.
For example: If I wrote: read one book a week, meditate, get in a better shape, learn to code. My most “urgent” would be either meditate or get in better shape so I would write either of those as #1 or #2.

Once you have defined your most urgent and sort your “resolutions” you should add a column to your list and call it “actions” to add the actions you need to take in order to achieve each resolution:

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As you can see, there will be some resolutions that require more than one action so it is good if you can keep your resolutions between 5-8 for this year.

Now comes the “easy” part;

Plan to build your actions as habits BUT only ONE PER MONTH
Why?? you might ask..
Well, (if you have listened to my latest podcast) you have learned HOW can you “do it all”. And how much energy the brain takes when you are doing something for the first time or few times.. but how after it becomes part of your habit, this new activity doesn’t take much energy from your brain anymore. That is how you are able to: wake up, wash yourself, drive to work or school or take the bus/train, and have a full productive day without feeling you had to think of every step you had to take for each activity.
If you would like to learn more about this, and how our brains can be optimized go listen to my podcast on your favorite podcast platform (just search for the yogi coder) 😉

Ok, back to building one resolution action as a habit at the time; it is simple and straight forward but 100% effective:

*Choose only ONE resolution action PER MONTH,
so Please please! DO NOT wake up on Jan 1st trying to do it all that day and start your new dreamed life all in one day, it wont work, your brain and body will feel exhausted and soon you will fall off doing all you wanted to do.
Instead, commit to only 1 action, the first one your sorted at your list, the one you feel is the most urgent.
So for January, don’t think of the rest of actions you have written down, only focus on adopting that 1 action to your daily routine.
Buy a wall calendar that you can hang somewhere visible at home and write your action to commit and cross every day you achieve doing it! (this is an extra tip I share on the tips section later down here) before you know it it will be February and that new action has been already incorporated to your daily routine without taking any more effort from your brain, and most interestingly you will find yourself waiting and looking forward for that new habit every day, because you have successfully built it as a new habit into your routine.

This is all you need to achieve up to 11 new actions, by December 2019 you will be able to look back and say I have done it all!!
Remember:

“people overestimate what they can do in a day, but they always underestimate what they can achieve in a year”

So go ahead and make it all happen. But first, make sure you read these important tips to make your habit building 100% effective:

IMPORTANT tips on how to make it more effective:

a. Daily habits are 70% easier to build than weekly habits.
So all actions you can incorporate to your day everyday (or every work day or weekend day) will work better than just once a week, though you will also be able to build once a week habits it might take longer time.

b. Build a context & triggers around your action,
for example if you want to read every day and you enjoy tea: find an hour of the day that you can be undisturbed (when you usually scroll down IG or turn on TV) and create a context where you find a cozy quite corner, prepare some tea and place your book by that space so every day you arrive from work and the same trigger that use to make you turn on the TV will make you start your water heater to make your tea and get into reading mode.

c. Commit with someone else, or with a physical calendar.
Having a person you commit the same habit with (your partner at home or a friend) will make it harder for you to skip.
But more effectively a VISUAL commitment (like a wall calendar) helps more than an other person because a physical visual calendar won’t arrive late, or feel lazy or cancel on you.
It has been proven that having a physical calendar you can look at from wherever you are at home (or some are that you walk by every day) helps more than any other technique to increase commitment.
So do yourself a favor buy a physical calendar in a bookstore, they will be on sale by now 😉 (or get my downloadable calendar down here), and mark down each month with your resolution action and cross each day with a big colorful marker.

I made a downloadable wall calendar for you! 😀
With some of my favorite phrases to keep you going throughout the year! you can download it for free here! And only if you feel like it, you can donate $2 for it. I added a small clue on the day of my bday 😉 tell me if you find it 🙂

Let me know how it goes and I will share my 2019 resolutions! 😀

Sending you all my best wishes for this and next year! 😀

Alex – the yogi coder

ps. if you read this before or after Jan 1st 2019, you can always start NOW !!!
The idea of a “new year or new week” to start something, is just in our romantic minds, we should always start NOW!
TODAY is the best moment to start. So just Do it!