This is fun—spending some time thinking about how to make your life (and mine) easier! Specifically, it’s fun to think about how to make easier for us to reach those goals/intentions we made for this year.
I like thinking about ease, but honestly doing easy is . . . well, not always so easy! At least not at first.
Because the first step to doing easy requires changing our minds about how to get things done. And as Tara Mohr says when introducing the concept in the “Let It Be Easy” chapter of her book Playing Big,
For so many of us—myself included—it’s radical to consider that major behavioral change or significant achievements could happen not because of one’s fierce will, struggle or hard work, but because we support ourselves so wisely and fully that change happens with ease.
The idea that we could do important work, or make big changes in our lives, with ease pushes up against a lot of cultural myths for Americans, especially the one about the “self-made man” (or woman, but mostly it’s still a man.)
You know, the independent success who pulled himself up by his own bootstraps with no help whatsoever, or the Lone Ranger who saves the world (except we might note that he actually wasn’t “Lone” and his trusty sidekick was a person of color, but I digress, sort of). You get the idea. We idolize the “no pain, no gain” and “just do it” types who never make excuses and always follow through.
But more and more research is showing that we are wrong.
More often than not, people who are successful reach their goals because they made it easy for themselves to do so.
For example:
- They make tiny steps towards habit changes, tying new habits to old routines, as recommended by Stanford researcher Dr. B.J. Fogg (check out his free 5 day program here http://tinyhabits.com/join/).