Many people live with the goal of change: they promise to exercise every day, read every night, or adjust their lifestyle one way or another. The minute rule is one of the methods that help you achieve goals.
In the West we have a bad habit of trying to make big changes quickly, we think it’s a matter of will, and we put ourselves on our shoulders tasks that we can’t actually accomplish.
“A habit can dominate another habit”. ? Og Mandino?
We want to change everything overnight, and when we fail, we feel guilty and frustrated. The fact is, we might want to do it, but we’re not using the right method. Then you can use some tricks, such as the minute rule: it’s free, simple and very effective, depending on people who have already practiced it.
As the name suggests, the minutes rule is a method based on the minimum unit of time. It was created in Japan and has been used in both professional and personal aspects.
The Orientals have the advantage of understanding that everything is a process and that great achievements are the result of an ongoing effort, which must complete different phases, its greatest virtue is to understand that haste almost always leads us nowhere.
The minutes rule says you should start making a change in your life for just a minute. If you want to maintain an exercise routine, start with one minute a day. Do the same with any habit you want to introduce or eradicate from your life. But look, you can’t fail and you have to apply it every day.
People who have practiced the minute rule ensure that it is extremely effective for these more difficult changes. The main enemy of action is mental, physical and emotional laziness, which arises when we have to do something that involves more effort than we can invest.
We think that something is very difficult to achieve because our brain resists change, we already have predefined ways to act and repeat them every day is a convenient way to handle the routine without too much wear and tear and rationalize what we have to do.
That’s why the minute rule is so effective, it allows you to set that mark on your brain to make a change, and this without having to make a great effort of adaptation, a minute passes quickly, but the mark remains: thus, the change takes root in our way of life, without us nodding.
Ideally, apply the rule for at least 60 days. It’s enough time for what used to be completely alien to our routine to become a family activity. And as we live this action as “normal,” resistance disappears.
The Orientals know that everything has its time and that the big changes happen little by little, the rule of minutes is only an initial help that allows us to prepare the body and mind for the new, but of course, things cannot continue to be practiced for a while. minute Training time for the new activity needs to increase gradually: from one to five minutes; five to ten and so on.
Cycles can last 60 days, but it still depends on each particular case, some people are more likely to change and can quickly move on to another stage, others, however, need more days to increase the time to practice the new activity, so it’s important that you know yourself well enough to determine your time.
The minute rule is ideal for tasks that do not motivate us and that cause a lot of laziness, an example is the exercise routine, but it can also be applied to any type of habit that we want to acquire. Think about it: with such a simple method, why not try it?