A Solid Foundation For Your Best Life

What can we do when our goals seem too lofty and float out of reach? Anita Chaudhuri asks the experts how to go back to basics and establish an effective new beginning through positive practical habits

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Usually, this is my favourite time of year. The ritual of gathering a pristine notebook and a rainbow of felt-tipped pens, plus magazines, scissors and glue never grows old. Creating a vision board and writing down my most cherished hopes and dreams for the upcoming 12 months has always been inspiring but, after an action-packed year, I feel strangely underwhelmed by the idea. While I’ve been busy on lots of projects, I haven’t made as much progress as I had hoped. Why should 2020 be any different?

This jaundiced mindset is abruptly refreshed when I read a passage by poet David Whyte from his new book Consolations (Canongate, £14.99). ‘It is always hard to believe that the courageous step is so close to us, that it is closer than we ever could imagine, that in fact, we already know what it is, and that the step is simpler, more radical than we had thought: which is why we so often prefer the story to be more elaborate, our identities clouded by fear, the horizon safely in the distance, the essay longer than it needs to be and the answer safely in the realm of impossibility.’

Am I in danger of making the vision for my future too grandiose, overcomplicating things that could in fact be simple? I go on a quest to find out and, in so doing, discover five basic ingredients for making lasting change in the here and now.

1 CREATE STRUCTURE

Looking back over the past year, I realise that my biggest problem is that I set big, shiny goals for myself without fully understanding the way to achieve them. There is a trope among self-development gurus that urges us to focus on the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ will happen, as if by magic. Clearly, that doesn’t always work. In search of advice about how to structure my goals, I turn to behavioural scientist BJ Fogg, director of the Stanford Behavior Design Lab. His book,