Reverb12 Day Twenty Four: New Habits

tyunglebower ♦ December 24, 2012 ♦ Leave a comment

What is the single most important habit you intend to cultivate in 2013?

I can’t claim that I have given specific thought to habits for 2013. That isn’t to say I haven’t given thought to what my goals for it will be, but until this prompt showed up I hadn’t considered plans in light of establishing new positive habits.

That being said, I suppose there are certain aspects of how I am approaching 2013 that could be distilled into particular habits. Though I am still ironing out the details I’ll present a likely new “habit” for the new year.

I want to get in the habit of thinking of three approaches to any goal or task I will undertake in 2013.

I’m a firm believer in plans. I don’t fly by the seat of my pants for most things, and I’m sure I take at least twice as long as most people in similar circumstances to come to a decision and take action. I suppose I may be one to at time over-plan, if you will. My mind can conceive of about 1,000 potential obstacles on the road to a destination, and can do so faster than a lot of people can process ten. Paralysis by analysis is something of which I am quite guilty at times.

The thing is, I don’t apply that scenario-building super power to solutions as often as I do to problems. (Potential problems.) If somehow upon meeting with a road block or facing a failure I could train my mind to go into its mega-dissemination mode in pursuit of solutions, alternate routes and different perspectives on the way to achieving a specific goal, I theorize that I may well be more success more often in more aspects of my life.

This approach could take many forms. One way would be to, upon each failure come up with either three alternate methods to attain the stated goal, as well as determine three factors that contributed to the demise of the plan. Right now I tend to make an elaborate  well thought out plan, consider that the lion’s share of my preliminary labor, and conclude that if after all that I still fail to achieve an objective, it wasn’t meant to be. But what if instead of doing that, the automatic response to failure or at least to road blocks was to step back and come up with those three solutions and those three reasons?

It might sound elementary to many of you, but for a man who will plan something for months, only to have it crumble in a matter of  days, (which is what happens to almost all projects involving more people than myself), it could just be the sort of new habit most needed to break into the next level of getting things done.

This, I think, would be a habit well worth cultivating in 2013.