This has been my best year yet. I’ve experimented with a lot of theory, worked on expanding my habit base, completed a number of challenges successfully, all while traveling quite a bit and adjusting to life in Spain. I’d say the spheres I made huge strides in this past year include Habits, Challenges & Personal Records, and Theory.

Habits
-Demolished my badly formed eating habit and reformed it as a family of small behaviors
-Did the same to my “early wakeup” habit
-Made a superhabit of rowing
-Superhabit of food recording
-Superhabit of pantry checks
-Made a habit of Meal Prep Sunday, my first weekly habit
-Made a superhabit of mobilization
-Superhabit of drinking a morning glass of water
-Superhabit of recording eating
-Superhabit of recording eating
-Started a habit of setting a wakeup alarm, which may of just unlocked becoming a morning person
-Significantly progressed in meditation
-Successfully began implementing multiple habits at once

Challenges & Personal Records
-Completed multiple 8 week HIIT progressions of rowing - like it was nothing
-Completed a 30 day no alcohol challenge
-Completed multiple full courses online - the first courses I’ve completed in over a decade. This stretched my writing habit in all sorts of incredibly uncomfortable new ways
-Completed a 5 day National Novel Writing Month - 50,000 words in 5 days
-Reached over a thousand days in both daily recording and meditation
-Completed and submitted a formal book proposal for this project
-Worked on intensity of habits while traveling, including continuing a HIIT progression while on a conference in Aruba and meditating on camel back on a trip to the Sahara Desert.

Theory
-Expanded on my theory of Delayed Onset Willpower Drain
-Formed an Identity Model of Habits, which seems to work better for pesky families of habits
-Experimented with Sandbagging in travel
-Reincorporated Challenges as a part of skill pushes rather than as a start to entering into a new habit
-Really delved into how to deal with skill pushes, the final major vector in my model of long term behavioral change
-Discovered mobilization, which I would include as an incredibly foundational behavior base along with meditation.
-Delved into Syncing with significant others, an aspect of vital importance most behavior change people don’t talk about
-Successfully worked on theories behind getting rid of habits

MOST IMPORTANT I have been successful with affecting others. Lydia is a year into a flossing habit. And my mother, is a full 30 days into a recording habit. She has completed this utterly effortlessly, despite, according to her, having so many troubles over the years of choosing to create a habit and sticking to it. I am most excited for her in the coming year.

For so many, the New Year is a chance to change, but change in the old model is to flex some part of you inside and, statistically, to be found wanting in failure. This new model is about effortless change, where the structure of the implementation and progression bears the onus of success of failure. When my mom talks about how easy it was to get to 30 days, that is everything, and the greatest accomplishment of all for me in 2016.