“It’s important to learn how to use your small bits of time, your five minutes, your minutes. All those begin to count up…Don’t wait until your children are grown, until your husband is retired…Learn how to use your snatches of time when they are given to you.”
—Ruth Asawa
This felt quote so relevant to many of our discussions in Momentum Lab.
We’ve talked a lot about the Minimal Effective Dose – a way to establish a habit, beat resistance, and work more efficiently. We can think of it as the smallest significant step forward.
During my Feldenkrais training we spent one afternoon coming up with ways we could communicate the value of the method quickly, when meeting new people.
Few people know what the Feldenkrais Method is or what it does (for those of you wondering – it’s a somatic approach that aims to improve function and bring more ease, grace, and spontaneity into our action).
We came up with the idea of 2-minute miracles.
These were quick little explorations that could give someone a direct experience of what it’s like to stand, move, or lie down with more ease and pleasure. By directing someone’s awareness through a simple movement, in a novel way, we can facilitate amusing and surprising changes in their perspective and proprioception.
To be sure, this a good way to market a modality no one’s heard of – but it also got me thinking of what I could do in 2 minutes that would have a significant impact on my experience and orientation to the day.
Many of us (Me!) can get stuck in a compulsive drive to perform for performance’s sake. When other factors (stress, time, relationships, responsibilities, injuries, life) compromise our ability to perform at the level we are accustomed, we (Me!) can get stuck in a zero-sum, all-or-nothing standoff with ourselves.
If we’re not going to do a 10-mile run at dawn, then we might as well have a pint of ice cream for lunch.
To reverse this paralysis, we need to find the easiest entry point to our desired behavior.
Sometimes we need to lower the bar to raise our chance of success.
Floss one tooth and you’re sure to floss at least ten more while you’re in there.
The barrier to action should be so ridiculously low that you can’t help but take that baby step forward.
That baby step will be easier to take with regularity, and if we do it enough, we will establish a tendency. Once we experience the momentum of forward motion, we can layer in more challenge and complexity.
According to Bill Gates, “People overestimate what they can accomplish in a year and underestimate what they can accomplish in a decade”
The confidence and momentum we feel when we take regular action with intention is compounding. This compounding effect can lead us to achieve things way beyond the scope of our imagination.
We can’t really get the full picture of compounding growth from our position on the curve, but we can have a fully embodied experience of that growth immediately.
Here’s a challenge you might try if you’re interested: Design a two-minute miracle for yourself.
Here are two ways you might approach this:
A) Have a look at your 25-Year Vision. What’s one behavior implicit to that vision that doesn’t feel natural in this moment. See if you can identify the smallest way that behavior can show up today.
B) Identify a state of being that is predicated on the achievement of some of your biggest goals. When you have $100,000,000 in the bank what do you get to feel? Find a way to give yourself that feeling today – even just a tiny hint of it.
C) Is there a core practice you’ve been looking to implement? Or a habit you want to pick back up? What would 2 minutes of that activity look like? What would it look like if it was really easy and really simple?
Your 2-minute miracle might be taking a break from your computer work and doing a few squats or making yourself a cup of tea. It might be taking a hot shower or doing a 2-minute meditation.
B.J. Fogg is the founder and director of Stanford’s Behavior Design Lab, the author of the book Tiny Habits and the creator of the Fogg Behavior Model (FBM).
I’ll leave you with this quote from Tiny Habits:
“In order to design successful habits and change your behaviors, you should do three things. Stop judging yourself. Take your aspirations and break them down into tiny behaviors. Embrace mistakes as discoveries and use them to move forward.”