5 ways to re-engineer yourself for success in 2022.

Have you ever had that awkward conversation where you have to deliberately curate every word in fear of upsetting the other person?

That’s what 2022 feels like. Everything on the surface is going well so far, but you’re terrified of angering it. You’re looking around the corner with a sense of dread of what more challenges await you?

This attitude is not the way to start the new year because you live in fear and uncertainty.

You have the choice to make 2022 different, but the way to do this successfully is by replacing your old toolkit with a new one. The old tools include habits, beliefs, mindset, pretty much everything you have used to navigate the last two years.

As with the psychology of habit change, you cannot give up a habit without replacing it with something different.

The way forward is to recognise the old habits that are not serving you and replace them with something better. Here are some new tools to re-engineer yourself to make 2022 your best year yet:

Replace procrastination with the habit of starting.

The common misconception about procrastination is that it is a self-discipline issue, but it’s a stress management tool.

Covid has elevated your daily stress levels, blurred the lines between work and personal life and completely overwhelmed your cognitive and emotional load.

You have spent most days worrying about ageing parents, family and financial uncertainty. And on top of all this, you need to work on that presentation.

Rather than view it as a simple 15-minute presentation, you have placed the entire future of your career on this presentation. Naturally, the feelings of fear of judgment and not being perfect arise.

To avoid these feelings associated with the task, you ditch the entire task and revert to cat videos or invent another activity like filing your emails. Eventually, two hours pass, and you are no further on your presentation.

Then the self-loathing begins, which pushes you into more negative emotions like guilt and shame. In this state, there is no chance of producing your best work.

Sound familiar?

The reality is you cannot change the stress; there will always be stress in your life. You need to replace the habit of delaying the task with the habit of starting.

Sit down at your desk with the commitment that you will only work on it for 15 minutes. That’s it.

Then chunk the task down. Do not think about ‘the entire presentation’ because this creates overwhelm. Focus on slide one. What is the heading of the slide? What bullet point or one image captures the point you want to make?

You can use this strategy for self-care too. Perhaps you imagine you need an entire hour for your exercise and the fear of losing time on work prevents you from starting.

Chunk it down into smaller micro bursts throughout the day. Rather than view a painful run, go for a brisk ten-minute walk around the block.

The habit of delaying and not starting drains your mental battery. Once you begin and create progress, it energises you differently and becomes easier to complete.

What if it’s a bold goal?

Perhaps the goal in question is not as simple as a presentation. Maybe you want to write a book or tackle a new certification? The thought of the finished goal is preventing you from starting. It feels too massive.

Ask yourself, ‘how can I chunk this down on a smaller scale?’

Can you write one short article to post on LinkedIn? Can you write one blog for your website or company newsletter?

Begin to see yourself as a writer by creating the evidence with action — writer’s write.

If an entire article feels too daunting, how about writing one sentence? That’s it. Start the process. Then the next day, you can continue to the following sentence.

Maybe on the third day, you get inspired to write three sentences?

There is no such thing as runners block; they get on the road and go.

Most of the time, procrastination has little to do with ability or self-discipline. It can be a fear of judgement or overwhelm. You simply have no idea where to begin.

Recognise the fear associated with the task and begin anyway. Combat these feelings with action rather than the habit of avoidance.

The truth is that your inaction will reinforce the story. If you want to change your story, take that first step. Today is the day to begin.

Replace self-criticism with self-praise.

Psychologist Marissa Peer reminds us that the mind likes what is familiar and avoids what is unfamiliar. When someone compliments you, do you say thank you? Or do you deflect it with comments such as “Oh, this is so old, I’m still so overweight — but you look fantastic’.

If you can’t accept a compliment from a friend, you need to dig a little deeper if you can first accept a compliment from yourself. The way to adopt the habit of self-praise is to make it familiar.

Stop waiting for the significant outcomes to permit yourself to acknowledge your progress. You don’t have to run the race, get the promotion or finish the book to feel entitled to accept self-praise.

Your default action when you achieve something is to disregard it or criticise yourself. It’s like that kid who got 98 out of 100 for a test and obsessed about their missed two marks.

Taking action, no matter how insignificant it may seem and then celebrating it, is the path to real change.

Stanford Professor BJ Fogg says ‘Emotions create habits. Not repetition. Not frequency. Not fairy dust. Emotions.’

Therefore, celebration and self-praise are essential as part of your habit creation formula.

Fogg says, “Scientists learned decades ago that rewards need to happen either during the behaviour or milli-seconds afterwards. Dopamine is released and processed by the brain very quickly. That means you’ve got to cue up those good feelings fast to form a habit.

Incentives like a sales bonus or a monthly massage can motivate you, but they don’t rewire your brain. Incentives are way too far in the future to give you that all-important shot of dopamine that encodes the new habit.

Celebration is habit fertiliser. Each celebration strengthens the roots of a specific habit, but the accumulation of celebrations over time fertilises the entire habit garden. By cultivating feelings of success and confidence, we make the soil more inviting and nourishing for all the other habit seeds we want to plant.

Above all, celebration teaches us how to be nice to ourselves — a skill that pays out the most significant dividends of all.”

The next time you catch the inner critic telling you it’s regular rant ‘you aren’t good enough, you’re an imposter, etc.’ — stop! Challenge the thought and choose a more empowering thought.

The more attention you pay to the negative mental chatter, the louder it becomes. Your inner critic is no more sophisticated than a toddler. When you ignore the toddler’s tantrum, it eventually stops screaming.

Tune in to the station of your inner cheerleader and ditch the inner critic.

Replace busyness with clarity.

The blurring of work and personal life has created more fragmented time in your day. You are left with a series of short bursts of time between meetings, lifts and personal responsibilities.

Your calendar has become a multi-coloured collage of calendar invites where people are searching for any open gap possible to impose their urgencies onto you.

As a consequence of the Covid lifestyle, you have become addicted to busyness and the ‘always on’ bustle.

When was the last time you had white space in your calendar?

The irony is that you are craving time to slow down and think, but viewing white space in your calendar makes you feel like you are doing something wrong.

The most important meetings are the ones you have with yourself. Block out slots in your calendar every week with the subject line’ Meeting with EXCO’. After all, you are the executive committee; you are leading you.

Go back to basics and use tools like the Eisenhower Matrix to help you focus and prioritise your time.

Do not get lost in Q3 activities (urgent but not important) where you sacrifice your time for other people’s urgencies.

Create the Q2 habit — making time for the important but not urgent. Important work includes proactive work, creative thinking, planning, prevention, relationship building, and learning.

Although these activities are less clickable and adrenaline-boosting, this is where you take charge of your own life and do the things that will make a real difference in terms of results.

Time spent planning reduces crises and firefighting that takes away your time and drains your energy. Even if you are convinced that you do your best work under pressure, science confirms otherwise.

The power of clarity over your priorities allows you to be deliberate with your time. When those decision moments come on spending the next precious hour, you know the difference between your life’s work and busy work.

Replace self-judgement with self-awareness.

You never ignore the petrol warning light in your car; you attend to it immediately. In the same way, you also have an early warning system.

Think back to when you made a colossal blunder — you sent that rude message, copied the wrong person on the email or lost your temper with someone. It was most likely because you never paid attention to your internal warning signals.

The bridge between where you are and where you want to begin with self-awareness. That means paying attention to your body wisdom; it knows when you are getting frustrated and anxious before you do.

When I get tense, I can feel my throat closing. Some people feel it in their stomachs, jaw and fists clenched, or they have a tightness in the chest. Pay attention — once you are aware of it, you can insert that mental pause button that will allow you to respond rather than react.

Rather than judge yourself for losing your temper, adopt the practice of self-awareness. The more aware you are of your early warning signals, the more effectively you can manage your state and decisions.

If you get triggered by a snotty email, take some deep breaths and neutralise the adrenaline in your body. Draft the email but walk away from it or save it in your drafts until you have calmed down. When you return to it, I guarantee you that you will not send it.

Rather than criticising yourself for the destructive behaviour and allowing the inner critic to make it worse, develop self-observation and tune in to the warning signs first so you can operate from a state of calm confidence in the heat of any situation.

Replace self-sabotage with self-leadership.

Each day is made up of moments, but the micro choices you make throughout the day will determine the path you take on how you experience the next chunk of time.

For example, do you choose to watch Netflix or go for a run when stressed? Do you give yourself a much-needed break, or do you power through your fatigue?

Research done at Duke University found that 60% of your actions every day are not decisions but habits.

When was the last time you pressed pause and put your habits under a microscope?

Perhaps you have been doing this behaviour for so long that it doesn’t even register to you that it may be destructive, and it has become a choice.

To break the cycle of self-sabotaging behaviour, you need to conduct a habit audit.

How can you interrupt a pattern you cannot even see? How can you expect to change when you are unaware of the actions holding you back?

Create a habit journal and map out your daily activities for one week.

Start with the habits around energy management and self-care:

· Nutrition — do I default to eating and drinking when I’m stressed?

· Sleep — what am I doing an hour before bed?

· Movement — am I getting enough exercise in a day? If not, what are my default excuses to avoid it?

· Relaxation — am I creating dedicated time for relaxation? How do I relax?

· Clutter — what can I let go of to make space for something new?

· Connections — am I reaching out to people who energise me?

Identify the pattern and trigger.

“Making a choice that is 1 percent better or 1 percent worse seems insignificant in the moment, but over the span of moments that make up a lifetime, these choices determine the difference between who you are and who you could be”- James Clear.

Once you have identified an area you want to change, perhaps drinking alcohol during the week, you can spotlight the behaviour's trigger.

Is it a location, a time of day or an emotion? Most people reach for the wine when they’re stressed or simply because it is a Friday afternoon.

The more honesty you can bring to your choices and understand what is behind them, the more powerfully you can effectively lead yourself.

Once your week of habit watching is up, ask yourself:

· Are these actions serving or sabotaging me?

· Are they aligned to my 2022 goals?

· Do I want to continue this behaviour?

· What habit can I replace this with to serve me better?

Final thoughts.

Letting go of what no longer serves you create space for new possibilities.

Imagine it’s December 2022 — what do you want to be able to report back from your year? What did you achieve? How do you feel?

Knowing what actions to drop and what to replace them with will enable you to own your days confidently, focus on the micro choices that have the highest impact, and reverse-engineer the life you want.

Here’s to new possibilities,

Warm wishes,

Lori