Small joy, big change
I’ve returned to the small, powerful joy of walking… and unwittingly unlocked joyful changes elsewhere in life.
You’ve set your one word intention for the year, and you know which area of your life you’d like to apply this to. The next step is to go further and form one habit. But which habit should you choose?
In my case, my one word is joy and I’ve decided to focus on moving my body more. So in short, I want to become a joyful mover. (This idea of naming an identity is important and one I’ll come back to in a future article… but let’s go with it for now).
Being a joyful mover could translate into all sorts of regular habits - ‘what would a joyful mover do?’ brought up ideas of yoga, running, dancing, cycling, the list goes on - but I settled on two criteria to help me decide which habit to pick: it needed to have a low barrier to entry (at this point it was a dark, cold January in the UK and ‘joyful moving’ would almost certainly involve venturing outdoors), and it needed to give me a quick, easy way to live my ‘joyful mover’ identity regularly, and of course, joyfully.
Finding (or returning to) a habit that brings joy
When the pandemic started I began a habit of walking around Peckham Rye, and did this almost every day for about 5 months. I remember the calm of walking the same route and noticing the enormous amount of change as winter turned to spring turned to summer. It felt bittersweet reconnecting with the awe and beauty of nature after many years of neglecting what was happening outside my home and the office.
Walking was the perfect way to slow down and to enjoy those daily windows of outdoor freedom during the first lockdown. I valued them all the more when life sped up again and the slow way of life from the initial lockdown started to dissipate.
That’s where the idea of returning to moving my body originally came from, and after reflecting on all the different ways I could joyfully move, the natural and easiest option was to go with the thing that I knew had worked before, and to get back to walking.
Starting your habit on the right foot
To help me stick to a daily habit I knew I’d have to do a little planning first - relying on willpower alone would have invited far too much friction into the process for it to be successful. There are many habit-forming tips out there, but the following three in particular helped me to consistently get outside, with my joy compass in hand.
Get primed to start your habit - as I said, this being January in the UK, I wanted to step out and enjoy an upcoming walk, not turn myself out into the cold as my chastising self may have done in the past. Partly this is a matter of mindset. I can imagine it will be a grim, miserable experience or I can see it as a refreshing change from being indoors and a chance to boost my mood. It’s also a matter of practicality. Simple advice, but a decent coat and a warm pair of shoes have made walking a joy rather than an uncomfortable challenge.
Make sure it really is one habit that is so easy that 9 times out of 10 you will actually do it - it is too easy for me to wildly overestimate the capacity I have for change in a short space of time, and underestimate how much I can do over a kinder time period. My old self would have seen ‘joyful mover’ and created a daily schedule of new habits that would make even a tiger mom wince. To make my new habit truly joyful I chose to go for one daily walk and made a promise to myself not to have to qualify it with scheduling more, rigorous exercise on top of that.
Give yourself a reward - as James Clear of Atomic Habits says, ‘what gets rewarded gets repeated’. In my case I worked out that I could time the midpoint of my walk with a visit to a place that sells great chai - a hot drink on a cold walk is a no-brainer reward for me.
A small joyful habit can be the grounding you need for many other joy-making changes to occur
So far I’ve hit those 9 out of 10 days, and aside from the regular chai, I’ve noticed other benefits: I’m noticing nature again; I’m getting to know my neighbourhood more, sometimes spotting the same people in my community running errands; I get to chat with the cafe staff, weaker ties being an important part of anyone’s social mix and a key protective factor against loneliness; and my mood is almost always uplifted when I step through the front door back to home/work life.
That’s a lot of joy generated already, but what has been a surprise is the indirect impact that focusing on one thing - the daily walk - has had on unlocking changes elsewhere in my life. I’m making more joyful decisions around eating, being more proactive in making social plans with friends and generally feeling a bit more grounded. Walking has unexpectedly been a gateway into other joy-making behaviours, and helped me a long way in reconnecting with nature, people and things I have so missed.
Which small, powerful habit will you focus on?
An invitation to reflect for yourself:
Take your one word intention and the area of your life you want to focus on - if you were to choose an identity (e.g. joyful mover) what would you pick?
For your identity, how can you live this daily? For example, what would you have to do daily to be a creative parent, or a calm french-speaker, or an appreciative financial saver?
If you’ve got a long list of ideas, what habit is the easiest thing you can start doing today? If you want to be a writer, what about starting with writing a sentence each day? (Yes it’s super easy but that’s the point!)
Next time from Year of the Habit…
Why identity-based vs goal-based habits are more likely to better serve you in the long run.
