Easy Enough

Many people freely list the habits they’d like to change or build, anticipating that if they can just get a behavior going, it will be easy to maintain.

• If I just read 1 chapter each day…
• If I went to bed a little earlier each night…
• If I did 15 minutes of jumping jacks each morning…
• If I carved out a half-hour for clearing my inbox…

The challenge is, it can be difficult to imagine a thing becoming easy, that seems hard now.  For example, if you exercise regularly, exercise doesn’t seem like a big deal. But if you don’t exercise regularly, not only does exercise seem like a lot of effort, it can seem like it will always be a lot of effort.  It’s hard to imagine it becoming an easy routine.

Oftentimes, that mental hurdle is enough to prevent us from starting in the first place.

So if you want to change a behavior, start by recognizing that: 

1. It’s probably not going to feel easy at first. If it did, you’d already be doing it regularly.
2. You don’t need to make it seem easy.  You just need to make it easy enough for you to stick with it.  And wait for your perception of "what's easy" to shift.

P.S. - If you’re looking for a book recommendation on the subject…Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg is a great place to start.  It’s grounded in extensive research and takes an incremental, sustainable approach to behavior change.