As we enter January, some people like to think about goals and resolutions for the new year. Granted, there’s nothing inherently special about New Year’s Day — it’s just another day on the calendar — but it does provide a convenient reminder to reflect on the past and think about the future.

Personally, I’ve made it a practice over the past several years to take the last week or so of the year to:

  • revisit what took place over the past 12 months; and
  • think about the direction things are going in the different facets of my life.

Sometimes I’ll set specific goals, but my approach to these has evolved over the years. I may still set some specific things I want to accomplish, but I’ve begun to focus rather on what habits I want to establish.

Change your habits, change your life

We are all creatures of habit, doing countless things every day without much, if any, thought. We’re simply acting and choosing and responding out of habit. But it’s these actions, and choices, and responses, over time, that have gotten us to where we are today, and will take us to where we end up tomorrow.

Establish good habits, and the resulting actions will have a compounding effect over time. And once the habits are established, maintaining them take less effort and willpower, all the while continuing their positive effect.

A goal is not enough

If I was a good athlete, and had a goal of one day playing in the World Series, that goal alone wouldn’t be enough to get me there. Talent and desire are important, but not sufficient. I would still need to develop the necessary habits and practices to help me become a world-class baseball player.

I may have a goal of losing weight, or improving a relationship, or learning a skill. But if I don’t change my habits, why do I think I’ll see lasting change in these areas. But if my habits change, it’s only a matter of time before these changes in my actions will begin to affect things I accomplish and the person I become.

Some simple tips for building new habits

Whether or not you choose goals or resolutions for the year, it’s still a great time to reevaluate the habits you’ve developed. Are there any habits that would be valuable to develop in the coming months? Are there any that need to change?

Once you’ve identified some habits to develop, here are a few tips that I’ve found to help with the process.

Choose one – For many of us, it can be tempting to try to make all kinds of different changes at once (this has been a hard one for me). My suggestion — and something I’m starting to do better myself — is to focus on one change at a time. Yes, it may seem slower. But which is better: Going slow and developing a handful good habits over the next year, or trying to do too much, and not forming any?

Know the why – Identifying the motivation for developing a habit can be easy to overlook, but is critical when you encounter resistance. Am I doing this because of the impact it will have on my health, or career, or relationships? Is it for for my own sake, or the sake of others? There’s no right answer, but if there’s a compelling reason for developing a new habit, taking time to identify it may be the secret to sticking with it in those moments where it’d be easy to give up.

Start small – In developing a new habit, another tip is to make sure whatever you’re committing to do is imminently doable. When we’re feeling motivated or inspired, it can be tempting to commit to too much. But when we’re not feeling that way, we don’t want our commitment to be so big that there’s internal resistance to even getting started. Rather, especially when we’re starting out, we want to commit to something that is so doable that we have no excuse for putting it off.

If your goal is to make a habit of regular exercise, for instance, instead of committing to long workouts several times a week, maybe you start with a simple commitment to walking for 5-10 minutes a day. Sure it may not seem like much, but it’s also not overwhelming, and so you’re more likely to get started. And that’s the point. Better to get started, however small, than to be inconsistent or not start at all. The goal is to create a habit, and there will be plenty of time to grow and expand upon what you’ve started. But at the beginning, just getting in the habit of showing up is most important.

Practice every day – Ultimately, you want whatever you’re doing to become second nature — to be something you don’t have to expend a ton of thought or willpower to stick with. But for this to take place, it will take practice, lots of practice. So the more times you can practice this new habit the better. My suggestion is to commit to something you can do everyday. Which is another reason to start small.

The benefit of this is that not only do you get more practice, but you can also quickly begin to build momentum. It reminds me of the Jerry Seinfeld technique of “not breaking the chain”, where he would use a huge wall calendar to track every day where he wrote a new joke. Soon he had a string of several days in a row, and there was internal motivation to keep the chain of days going.

Stick with it for 30 days – Instead of committing to something for the rest of your life, or the indefinite future, how about committing to it for the next 30 days? Sometimes, when you know there’s an end in sight, you’re more prone to stick it out. Habits don’t change overnight; it will take some time. Sticking with it for a month gives you a real chance at developing consistency in that area, but also gives you the chance to reevaluate it at the end and see if it’s worth continuing.

Which habits will you choose?

Whether you have any New Year’s resolutions or not, I do encourage you to take stock of your habits. Some people have the grandest goals for the future, but their dreams will only get them so far without the habits and practices to support them.

But habits are about far more than what they help us to accomplish. They’re also an integral part of forging the kind of person we become. Which is one more reason to pay attention to the state of our habits as we enter the new year.