The New Horizons Project

I came across a great article today by the guys at Pickthebrain.com entitled “How to Focus Your Enthusiasm”. The post looks at how runaway enthusiasm can often cause motivation for a task to fade after a short period of time when trying to change habits and behaviours in 30 days. When undertaking a 30 day trial Pickthebrain.com suggests that runaway enthusiasm can cause burnout within as little as 10 days.

I’ve not covered 30 day trials before on TheNewHorizonsProject.co.uk but the premise is very simple. Pick a habit or behaviour that you would like to change or take up and focus on it for 30 days. After 30 days of doing your new thing (exercise, not smoking, meditating, etc) the process with become instinctively habitual and will require little or no willpower. The idea is to tackle one thing each month rather than 3 or 4 different goals at once.

This post really struck with me today as I was thinking only shortly before I reading it that I wanted to change an existing habit that I have and that maybe I was focusing by mind on the wrong thing. I currently spend quite a lot of time online, which is neither productive nor useful half of the time and for a long time I’ve wanted to change that, replacing that lost time with time spent meditating. For months I’ve been thinking of only reducing my internet use rather than focusing on my ultimate goal of meditating everyday. I was focusing on the negative rather than the positive.

So I’ve decided to set myself a 30 day trial. To meditate everyday for at least 20 – 30 minutes. If after 30 days I can make this a habit then not only will I have succeed in meditating regularly but will have also have reduced my internet use by up to 30 minutes a day. However, for the next 30 days I am only going to focus on meditating for 20 – 30 minutes everyday.

I challenge to do 2 things today.

1. Read the post How to Focus Your Enthusiasm by Pickthebrain.com it’s really good!

2. Set yourself a 30 day trial and focus on it for 30 days. One goal and one goal only.

Why not tell me your goal for the next 30 days by leaving a comment below.

Good luck

Peace

Photo by Alessandro Ronchi

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1. 7 Deadly Sins - Tastefully Driven Blog Says:
   August 29th, 2008 at 1:48 pm

   [...] If you can associate with any of the sin or vices listed above and you want to remove them from your daily life then you can do so by focusing of one at a time. I have written about changing a habit in a month previously in my article, How to Focus your Enthusiam, and you can use the same technique here. For the next 30 days focus on one sin and everyday day try to concentrate on doing the opposite of that particular vice. You could try meditating on the positive things every morning, writing yourself little notes that you can refer back to throughout the day to motivate you. You could even write a positive statement and set it as your PC’s screen saver. [...]