Experiment Your Way to Change

United States, 2021.

The new year is when we traditionally make resolutions to change, and then just as traditionally break our resolutions. Change is hard, and simply resolving to change rarely produces sustainable change. I’ve spent a lot of time studying how people can make lasting change, and much of my practice is helping people make such change. So at the beginning of the year, I want to share one approach that can often produce real results.

Since our minds and bodies often resist change, making a major resolution and then relying on pure willpower—a “just do it” mentality—rarely succeeds. Instead, set an ultimate goal, but then break it down into smaller steps, and make your resolution be to try small, iterative experiments towards those steps. This approach gives you concrete actions you can take, and each experiment, whether it works or not, gives you more information and brings you closer to your goal.

 "A ‘just do it’ mentality rarely succeeds."

For example, I worked with an entrepreneur who found that increasingly they had a short temper during meetings, making it difficult to lead effectively. After considering what was causing his temper to flare, we realized that he wasn’t getting enough sleep. He would stop work and go to bed at an appropriate time, but his mind was still racing and he couldn’t fall asleep.

As we all know, simply telling yourself “you must fall asleep NOW” is counterproductive, and if anything makes you less likely to fall asleep. So he couldn’t solve the problem by simply resolving to get more sleep. And while there is plenty of advice out there on how to improve sleep—take melatonin, stop looking at screens an hour before bedtime, use a white noise machine, etc.—none of them work for everyone.

Instead of resolving to get more sleep, he set that as the ultimate goal, and resolved to experiment with different ways to improve his sleep. Many of the experiments he tried had no effect, but he didn’t consider those failures, as with each experiment he learned more about himself. Eventually he discovered that he slept better after a hard workout. And once he had this insight that he needed physical activity to switch his brain off, he then experimented with various types of physical activity before bedtime, such as walking the dog or lifting weights, until he found one that worked and which he could fit into his regular routine. This solution wouldn’t work for everyone, but it worked for him, and he could only find it through experimentation.

So take your New Year’s resolution, and instead of trying to achieve it through pure willpower, use it as a goal, and break it down into smaller steps that would get you closer to that goal. Then let your resolution be to experiment with various approaches to achieving those steps. Not every experiment will succeed, but each one will give you more insights on what works for you, and bring you closer to your ultimate goal and real change.