New Year’s resolutions alternative: Twelve 30-day experiments

[Back to 5 more effective alternatives to New Year’s resolutions]

What if, instead of spending your days trying to improve and excel by “getting it right,” you treated life as a learning lab, full of experiments and discovery?

I’m a huge fan of the experimental approach to life. When we conduct an experiment, there is no right or wrong – only results and information you can apply as you move forward. It takes the pressure and judgment off and frees you to explore, learn, and grow.

One approach to experimental living that I’m a huge fan of is the 30-day experiment.

Instead of gritting your teeth and resolving to make a permanent change, you simply say, “What would happen if I ____ for 30 days?” For example, what would happen if I:

• Exercised 5 days a week?
• Wrote a daily gratitude journal?
• Told my partner something I appreciate about them every day?
• Wrote down something new I appreciate about myself each day?
• Stopped eating sugar?

Approach it with curiosity, wondering what will happen. What will you discover? You can take notes along the way, do a post-game review, or both. The key is that you have some kind of way to unpack what you’re learning.

While positive changes often do come about as a result of 30-day experiments, that’s not the goal. The goal is to give yourself a way to take action without saddling yourself with the binary judgment of success or failure.

Think about it. In an experiment, there is no success or failure. Only learning. For example, if you decide to do a 30-day meditation experiment, that learning could take a number of forms, such as realizing:

• I feel good when I meditate regularly.
• Sitting meditation isn’t for me. I need something more active, like a walking meditation or yoga.
• If I don’t meditate first thing in the morning, it’s not going to happen.
• If I just sit for a while without pressuring my brain to be quiet, my mind eventually starts to settle.

The goal isn’t to “meditate right,” or even to continue with the meditation practice after the 30 days is done (though doing it for 30 consecutive days is often enough to get people over the initial hump of trying to do something new and unfamiliar). It’s to do the experiment, unpack what there is to learn, and apply that learning to your life moving forward.

30-day experiments: Goldilocks-approved

The thing I love most about 30 day experiments is that they are big enough to notice their impact (as opposed to, say, cutting out sugar for two days), but not so big that their sheer size makes it feel daunting to stick with it. Not too much, not too little. Just right.

Thanks, Golidilocks.

Map your experiments

Interested? Then it’s time to map out the experiments for the coming year (don’t worry – nothing is set in stone. You can change them as insights and ideas unfold through the year).

Start by making a laundry list of things you’d like to explore over the coming year. Those might all be things associated with a specific goal (for example, with a goal of improving your health, your laundry list might include things to do with various aspects of diet, exercise, hydration, accountability, mutual support, etc.). Or it might cover a broad range of personal and professional growth topics.

Then identify specific experiments you can take action on – like keeping a thermos filled with herbal tea at your desk so you can drink enough water each day. Map out the year with a new experiment each month.

As you do the experiments, you’ll probably find that some of them you’ll want to continue (“I feel so much better when I get to bed by 10 and get enough sleep.”) some of them you’ll see a modified version that works better for you (“I hate going to the gym, but I love dancing!”), and some you’ll want to drop altogether.

Unpack the learning

The questions you ask to unpack the learning will be as varied as the experiments you conduct. But here are a few you can ask that apply to a broad range of possibilities.

• What am I learning as a result of doing this?
• What feels like it’s working?
• What effect is this having on me?
• What is making this difficult? How could I change that?
• What do I want to carry forward?
• What do I want to stop once the experiment is done?
• Is there a slightly different angle I could take with this that would make it easier/more natural/more effective?

Once you wrap up your 30-day experiment, you can decide what you want to carry forward, what you want to leave behind, then dive into the next one.

So how about you? What experiments would you try?

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