0:07
If you are new to the show or have tuned in before you know that mind, body, spirit connection is as important as business tips and tricks and methods. I believe that it all fits together. And since the new year and a new decade, a great way to feel fresh new energy is to really dive into the whole picture. So I've decided to focus on some general best practices for the past few shows. And for this one, rather than photo specific stuff. You can easily find some of the more photos specific stuff because I've labeled those shows, photo-focus shows.

0:43
Today is going to be sort of a lifestyle hack. I don't love that word. But I feel like since I've discovered this little thing, it's really made a huge, huge impact on my life and it's the combination of a couple different things.

0:59
Mel Robbins talks about it a little bit and it comes up in different podcasts that I like to listen to. If you are struggling with kind of the pressure to maintain all of the resolutions and goals that you have this especially being a new decade and a new year, you sort of get inundated with like health and fitness and business and lifestyle goals and it's it's really overwhelming. And if you're like me, you might have a ton of different interests. Like I'm still trying to get to a place where I can speak Spanish and I love playing the guitar and I love knitting and I there's just a bunch of stuff that I love to do and I'm very dedicated to my meditation and wellness practice and my exercise…

1:41
So when you're looking at the calendar and you see how many hours there are in the day, big lofty goals and sticking to your goals can just be absolutely overwhelming. So this is something that I recommend that you try: pick a goal or two or three I have about five so like meditation, Spanish, guitar, Photoshop, and I can't think of the other one right now. But pick things that you feel passionate about or feel like they're important, or the kinds of things that that little voice in your head gets gets louder and louder when you don't do. For some of us that's exercise. For some of us it's something that we've been meaning to do, but we don't.

2:16
Maybe you bought like a new course that you still haven't started. Or maybe you have a cookbook that you still haven't cooked from, or whatever it is, pick one or two things and try this: make time during the work week, five days a week, leave the weekends open for flexibility, you may find yourself diving into stuff even more on the weekends, but don't put pressure on yourself, make five minutes a day five for the thing. And you might think the first reaction is, well, if I only do five minutes, I'm not really doing anything. But the truth is, is by opening the cookbook, checking out the recipes, finding one that you like making a grocery list, you've made one small step that not only gets you closer to the thing that you've been meaning to do.

3:00
But the reward center in your brain is like, “Yeah, I did it.”

3:02
And that's a huge huge step towards positive habit building. So if you do this five minutes, looking at the cookbook thing, buying groceries, whatever a day, you're going to find that over time when all of these five minute increments add up that you're going to be a lot farther along in your goal than you would have been if you put this massive amount of pressure on yourself to get to the big huge goal without all the little steps.

3:25
That being said, usually five minutes turns into way more.

I've talked about this a lot on the show. So keep the mindset with all of this stuff that's overwhelming you of: this or something better. Meaning I'm going to do this for two minutes a day, or maybe it'll turn into two hours, but I'm going to do two minutes because I'm dedicated to building the habit and I'm dedicated to building the reward center in my head so that I don't feel bad about not doing it. You will be surprised super surprised how well that goes.

3:52
I was looking back over my Duolingo Spanish stuff and I made so much progress last year and these little tiny, 5, 10, 15-minute increments. It was amazing. That's one of those things that's tough to measure until you have a year to look back on. And as I say, in a lot of my courses, it's like growing your hair out, like you're not going to notice a week's worth of growing your hair out, but you'll certainly notice a month or a year. So think of things in smaller increments. Don't get caught up and finding your passion or finding your purpose. It's too big, it's too stressful, and it's too much way too much pressure. In any one of these little tiny micro steps. You could go in tons of different directions with it. You might start cooking at home five days a week, you might take a cooking class, you might really get into making YouTube videos with cooking, who knows. All I'm saying is just don't put the pressure on yourself and just do the thing and see where that takes you.