As the New Year rolls around, people all over the world commit to turning over a new leaf, with an aim to better their lives in one way or another. I love the feeling of walking into a room full of my friends or colleagues after the New Year, because everyone is filled with new energy, ready to conquer the insurmountable task that they’ve committed to achieving over the next three hundred and sixty five days. While the newfound enthusiasm towards their big-picture life goals typically starts to fade after a mere few weeks, it is refreshing to experience while it lasts.
The funny thing about New Year’s resolutions is that many people hang a ribbon on a tree with words written down that resemble one of the biggest personal transformations that they can imagine. While the goal to ‘explore the world’ or ‘change your body’ may seem appealing and realistic when you’re at your peak of positive energy while ringing in the New Year, we often see it quickly begin to slip through our fingers as the daily intricacies pull us back into the daily grind.
While people often think that immense changes are required in order to alter the state of their lives, it is often the small things that repetitively irk us throughout the day which pulls our minds and bodies off track. Rather than committing our newfound energy to removing these small annoyances from our lives so that we can focus our full attention on the big things that we want to achieve, we often sweep the small things under the rug, hoping that somehow they will just fade into oblivion. In reality, it is often not the big things but rather the small things that serve as obstacles in route to achieving our goals.
It wasn’t until I took myself off of my daily autopilot that I realized how much the small annoyances that I encounter throughout my day are responsible for shifting my mood and ultimately bringing down my performance.
On a typical morning, I wake up around 5:50AM, press the snooze button once or twice, only to avoid having to get up and walk up the stairs to the closet to get a towel before I can take my morning shower. While inevitably I would love to sleep for another hour, I realized that it wasn’t so much having to get up and shower that bothered me, but rather the fact that I knew I had to walk up the stairs to get a towel when I very well knew I should have put it in the bathroom the night before. After shamelessly dancing on my bed while playing dress up in my closet, I usually make my way to the train, bracing myself for the breadth of annoyances that come with the all-so-typical NJ Transit experience. While I would characteristically cluster all of the aspects of that fun-filled experience together, I started to try to understand the foundation of what it was that flustered me so much about my morning train ride. I realized that it wasn’t physically getting onto the train and sitting there for an hour that bothered me, but rather the fact that I have to get out my wallet, unzip it, and hunt for my ticket as the conductor stands over my shoulder and impatiently taps his foot while I struggle to get my ticket out of the small opening in my wallet. I hate when I feel like people are waiting on me, and I realized that this daily in-and-out ticket routine was the main source of my negative feelings towards the NJ Transit experience.
While these annoyances may seem practically insignificant to some, they are only a few of the small things that were bringing negative energy into my life one day after another. After realizing the extent to which these small annoyances were shaping my mood and affecting my performance, I committed to spending a few months really ‘sweating the small stuff’, trying to pinpoint the small things in my daily routine that I’ve been brushing under the rug, and committing to eliminating them. I started bringing down my towel for my morning shower the night before, and I got a new backpack with a small card holder in the front so that I no longer have to go digging through my bag for my ticket on the train each morning. Through changing intricate details that typically bring about negative energy throughout my day, it has really cleared my mind, leaving it open to focus on the big things that I’m trying to achieve rather than remaining fixated on the small annoyances that I used to avoid changing.
Though setting big-picture goals is incredibly important and arguably more glamorous when presenting them to our peers, it is often unknowingly the small things that stand in the way of achieving our life goals. So rather than focusing on only the big things without stopping to question why things aren’t going your way, I encourage you to take a momentary pause to clear the clutter out of your life. Spend a week or two focusing on pinpointing all of the small things that bother you throughout the day, and try to understand the source of your negative energy. While it may take a few weeks to adjust to your personal version of walking up the stairs to get your towel the night before rather than in the morning, the tuning of our daily routines sets us up for a day that will work in our favor. Then our minds will be primed to pour all of our additional energy into achieving those big-picture goals without sweating the small stuff.