The 21-Day Personal Growth Experiment

Isn’t that an alarming quote?! No doubt you’ve experienced what Psychologist Rick Hanson is referring to. Just think of all the ‘life changing’ books you’ve read, classes taken, lessons learned… that are now fuzzy memories. 

Growth takes practice. We wish there was an easier way, but that is simply how the most important learning is achieved--from trying out new behaviors and then practicing them consistently until they become a habit. The 21-Day Personal Growth Experiment is what will make all the life changing information in these modules sticky.

What often happens is a person will read a good book or listen to a motivating TED talk and get excited about some new changes they want to make. But the challenge is this: that sense of motivation has to actually translate into actually doing things differently, and doing them differently consistently. Ninety-nine percent of the time the motivation fades and a few weeks later a person finds themselves right back where they started. Real change takes effort. There’s just no way around it.

Here’s another way to think of it: imagine that you wake up one morning with a deep desire to learn how to play tennis. You’ve heard how great it is and about its benefits, so you find a quality website, watch some instructional videos, read books... And voila! You’re an expert! No? Clearly, you wouldn’t stop there. You’d schedule time on the court for practice, practice, practice. You can read indefinitely about the correct way to hold a racquet, but until you actually experience it in your hand and take a swing, see what results you get, and then make course corrections and try again until you find something that works for you, you won’t really know it and you won’t functionally change from where you are right now. The same concept applies to making meaningful improvements to your well-being; many of us stop at the information gathering stage. The 21-Day Personal Growth Experiment is how we move from knowing about well-being to living what we know.

What we’ve tried to do with each of the modules is give you a menu of the best available research-based exercises and practices that will help you develop the skills for that topic. Then, for your 21-Day Personal Growth Experiments, you can sample from those practices and spend more time with the ones that fit you best. This gives you the structure that you need to get started implementing different strategies, but also gives you some flexibility to experiment, change things up, and do some work on your own to find the variations of these strategies that are going to work best for you. What we hope to see happen is that as you practice these different exercises you’ll start to bring in your own creativity, your own wisdom and experience from your life, (because you know yourself better than anyone else), and you’ll put in the work to adapt them and to figure out how to make them work in your real life - to make them your own. And that creativity, that extra work, even though it’s hard, is what’s going to make the difference in creating real, long-lasting change. 

Now, 21 days really isn’t enough for these strategies to become a habit for you. It can actually take anywhere from 18 to 254 days to develop a habit (Lally et al., 2010), so the 21-day experiment is meant to be used as a springboard for launching you onto a great new trajectory. It’s a reasonable amount of time to dive into these evidence-based practices, find what works for you, and then make a plan for how you want to incorporate these practices into your life for the long-term. 

It really is an investment in yourself. We want you to invest 20-30 minutes a day learning about and especially practicing the strategies and exercises that go along with the topic that you're studying. The investment of 20 minutes a day may or may not seem like alot for you, but if you have been swamped all day and you don’t have 20 minutes, do 5 minutes. It’s the consistency that’s important. It may also be helpful to be consistent with time and place as you form your new habit. If you are learning to meditate, for example, doing it first thing in the morning in the same place will help make the habit stick (see also our resources on Growth Habits). Approach this practice time as your protected time. Remember this is your investment in yourself, and not only yourself, but those around you. Financial planners recommend setting aside 10-20% of your income for future needs. For perspective, 20-30 minutes is only about 3% of your waking time. 

Finally, it’s helpful to approach these strategies as experiments. You don’t know how it’s going to turn out until you try. Experiment with a new behavior and sit back and notice the difference it makes in your life. What will happen as you practice these strategies and find what works for you, is over time you’ll notice your life is better. You’ll look back and realize you are struggling less; you will still be working to improve yourself, but it will come from a place with more ease and grace. Over time, like a growing seed, you’ll see a swell of well-being emerge from your efforts and wonder at the effect a little consistent investment in nurturing yourself makes.

Contributors: Andrea Hunsaker and Jared Warren