The 24-hour micro goal challenge
Achieve your big dreams one step at a time
What small change or habit do you want to integrate into your life? Maybe you want to grow your Substack following, or commit to a daily mindfulness practice, eat more vegetables, run a 5K or read more books. For me, it’s making time for creativity and writing stuff like this. Whatever it is, to make change happen, you need to make your goal stick. How can we commit to making our dreams real? How do we follow through? The answer is simple: write down the small steps you need to take to get there. And refer back to your commitment often.
To start, sit quietly for 3 minutes and think about what it is you want to develop, change, or how you want to grow. What is coming up for you? What tools do you already have at your disposal? How will you integrate this new habit? Who will benefit? Think about it broadly and widely. Start to think about how can you carve out just 5 minutes a day to develop this area of your life, to reach your bigger goal.
The power of putting pen to paper
To make it real you need to write down your goal. The impact of writing down your goal on a piece of paper or in a notebook is remarkably powerful. It has been proven that people who very vividly describe or write down their goals are anywhere from 1.2 to 1.4 times more likely to succeed in their goals than people who don’t. Simply put, if you write it down, it becomes real. The act of writing encodes the information in your brain, and the physical note is something you can easily refer back to: pin it on your wall, put a post-it note on your computer, attach it to the fridge. The more you see it, the more likely you are to remember it; your brain will recognise this as significant and be more likely to recall the information.
Scientists call this the ‘generation effect’ whereby if you write down your goals yourself, i.e. you ‘generate’ the words yourself from your own mind, you are more likely to commit and follow through. This has been proven to be an effective way to remember things, and — importantly — make them stick.1
The next 24 hours are crucial
Now you have given it some thought, the secret to success is to write down one thing you can do in the next 24 hours to get closer to your big goal. This is your micro goal. You need to think short-term in order to make the habit achievable and to make it stick. Think: what small steps can I take now towards achieving my vision?
Write down your micro goal. Practise your micro goal every day for a week. Adjust and revisit your micro goals if needs be. Is the new habit starting to stick? How does it feel? Take 3 minutes to reflect in a week’s time.
In June, I wrote down ‘Grow my Substack to 100 subscribers’. This was my big goal. My micro goal — and what I did over the first 24 hours — was simply ‘Write a list of potential Substack articles’. Which I did. It focused my thinking on my bigger aim.
And here we are. I am well on my way to 100 subscribers.
I’d love to hear how you get on.
Liz.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-020-01762-3