Change: New Year, Fresh Start

My grandmother, Kay, was incredibly influential in my life. There are so many qualities I appreciated about her, but one in particular was the way she would run toward change. She re-arranged her furniture quarterly, loved a new coat of paint on a wall, and consignment stores were regularly visited after cleaning out closets. By witnessing her ability to embrace change, it became pretty ingrained in me as well.

Over the winter break I found myself off-loading bags of clothing to local charities, painted our home office, cleaned out most the kitchen drawers, and downsized all my accessories from jewelry to handbags to shoes. It feels so refreshing to start the year with a revitalized relationship to my things.

In the process of this refresh, I was also reading Atomic Habits by James Clear, which may have influenced some of this change energy. Wow, this book! There is a reason this book has sold over 10 million copies. It is chock-full of amazing tidbits breaking down the psychology of change and making change incredibly digestible. Reading this book was an important reminder to me that change is not embraced by the majority of people, yet the tools this book offers can make it so much more appealing. Here is one nugget from the book that feel particularly important.

Identity

Throughout life we decide what parts of self become defining parts of our identity. I am an avid exerciser, a good friend, and a music lover. I allow these parts of self to be defining elements of my identity. I am also a jewelry creator, an acrylic painter, and a BBQ griller, but these components of me are far less defining because of the weight I give them in my life.

Clear takes the concept of identity and puts it as a central tenet in understanding habits. Clear explains we go about trying to change habits from the wrong focal point. We often start with the outcomes we want to accomplish rather than a more internalized focus. He depicts three layers of change in a circular model with identity being at the core, the process of change being the next layer, and the outcomes positioned at the most external layer. If we start our change from the identity layer, the change we want to make becomes more integrated.

For example, at the beginning of this blog I was talking about a part of my identity. I am a person who loves organization and regular refreshing of organization. I’m proud of this part of me and it feels rewarding for me to engage in behavior that reinforces this identity component. My behaviors, whether it be organizing a closet or returning emails or responding to texts, are often influenced by my identity.

Conversely, I am not a physically flexible person. Stretching is a challenge for me. If I start to think of myself as a bendy kind of person, Clear’s theory is I will start making changes related to that part of my identity. If I start thinking, “what would a yogi do?” or “how would a bendy person spend time?,” it is possible my perception of stretching and incorporating it in to my life will be met with a lot less resistance.

A simple example Clear gives in the book is a person who is trying to stop smoking. When someone offers that person a cigarette, the person’s response could be, “No thanks, I’m not a smoker.”

It is powerful to think about the parts of our identity we want to embrace especially when we aren’t were we want to be at this current moment. If we act from our imagined identity, it is only a matter of time before we reach it.       

For further explanation and so many more tips, please get the book Atomic Habits by James Clear. A very worthy read!