I’ve been talking a lot this week about trying new things. However, it’s easy to enact change in your life when change is forced upon you – at the start of a new calendar year, a new school year, summer, a new city. Change is a built in excuse for improvement. But what should we do when we are in a rut? Or when we have had the same goals of improvement for a while, but just can’t seem to achieve them?
Well, Matt Cutts suggests that if there is something out there that you have always wanted to do, just try it for 30 days. Want to improve your writing? Write something every day for 30 days. Want to get fit? Try doing pushups every day for the next month. Want to cut out sugar from your diet? Try going 30 days without it.
It’s as simple as that. Cutts notes in his TED talk that 30 days is just short enough for your goals to seem achievable, but just long enough to maybe induce a lifestyle change. There are plenty of other blog posts out there that give suggestions for this challenge so you can look there for inspiration if you don’t know what challenge to try first.
Stop waiting for New Year’s Day to make your big fitness goals (which, at least for me, always fail) and start making little changes now. As for me, with all of the other changes on my plate, I’m starting off simple. For the next 30 days I will drink eight 8-oz glasses of water every day. I’ll let you know how it goes!
Caveat: A good friend of mine actually sticks to his new year’s resolutions for an entire year. If he can go without added sugar for one year, or fried food for another, I feel like I can accomplish anything for 30 days straight.