Motivation Monday | Conducting personal experiments to achieve your goals.

We're wrapping up the first three months of the year.  As we head into the second quarter, I'd like to try something a little different.  I heard a goal achieving technique mentioned by a couple of different people so I figured I should give it a shot.  It's this idea of planning out your goals and actions in two week increments.  Basically you create a goal for the month, then write down what specific actions you'll do for the next to weeks that will bring you towards your goal.  At the end of the two weeks, you analyze and create another two week plan that'll bring you the most results.

The second individual who brought up this idea called it "two week experiments."  I fell in love with the idea of two week experiments for a few reasons.  First.  The word experiment takes away some of the stress and pressure of having to achieve a certain outcome.  With goals, you have to achieve it, otherwise you've failed.

Experiments, on the other hand, are somewhat fun in nature.  It's reminiscent of middle school science class.  An experiment brings out the curious nature in us.  We want to take the steps to see what the outcome will be.  The outcomes isn't necessarily judged as good or bad.  They're just results.  And if we want to achieve a different result, we conduct a different set of actions.

Sometimes, with a goal, we lose steam halfway through, and give up. Experiments keep us interested.  We're tracking and measuring along the way.  We take the feedback given and make the decision to run a new experiment or accept the results.  With a personal experiment, we also track and record our actions and outcomes which can come in handy in the future if you want to recreate the same results.
The most valuable aspect of the experiment, in my opinion, is that you can use it as a way to get over your fears.  Dedicate two weeks towards taking actions that you've been avoiding.  Stay consistent and if you see no measurable outcome, you can conduct the experiment again (changing some of the variables) or you can stop.
 
People are always saying that you will get great results if you step outside your comfort zone.  Why not test that presumption using a few personal experiments.  I'm really excited about doing comfort zone experiments.   With every experiment, there's a hypothesis.  In the case of the personal experiment, the hypothesis is the outcome I would like to create.  I'll theorize which actions are likely to cause/create those items and get to work.  Once the experiment is over, I'll measure my result.  If the results are ideal, I can replicate the experiment or start a new one.  If the results are not as expected, I can theorize why and adjust the experiment accordingly.  There's no failure. Just results.

Since it's Monday, I'm setting up my first two week experiment. I'm so excited to try this.  My mind is bubbling over with experimentation ideas.  I'll start with one at a time and once I get the hang of it, I'll layer on several experiments in a two week period.  Just to make sure I follow through, I'll make sure to reward myself at the end of the experiment to help it develop into a habit.