Audiobook7 hours
Small Move, Big Change: Using Microresolutions to Transform Your Life Permanently
Written by Caroline L. Arnold
Narrated by Soneela Nankani
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
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About this audiobook
A Wall Street tech leader explains how small behavioral changes lead to major self-improvement Whether trying to lose weight, save money, or get organized, we' re always setting goals and making resolutions but rarely following through on them. Determination and willpower aren' t strong enough to defeat our mass of ingrained habits; to succeed we have to learn how to focus our self-control on precise behavioral targets and overwhelm them, according to longtime Wall Street technology strategist Caroline Arnold. Small Move, Big Change is Arnold' s guide to turning broad personal goals into meaningful and discrete behavioral changes that lead to permanent improvement. A microresolution is easily kept and designed to nail a self-improvement target exactly and deliver benefits immediately. While the traditional resolution promises rewards on a distant " someday," a microresolution rewards us today by instantly altering our routines and, ultimately, ourselves. A wife, mother, and business innovator, Arnold uses her own successes and failures as case studies. Contrasting her career success with her personal resolution failures, Arnold recounts how by analyzing her own behavior she was able to reengineer her resolutions so that they were guaranteed to succeed every time, from losing weight to improving key relationships. Providing scores of engaging examples from the wide circle of colleagues and friends who practice her microresolution method, Arnold also shows how her system is supported by new willpower and habit science.
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Reviews for Small Move, Big Change
Rating: 3.8958333333333335 out of 5 stars
4/5
24 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Simple but helpful suggestions to make positive changes in your life.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This book has been so helpful to me. If you are struggling to make big changes in your life, start small. Start by reading this book and putting the author's suggestions into practice.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Continuing down my path of attempting to be more successful in my goals, I found this mostly well-done book a couple of weeks ago. The premise is fairly simple: large, sweeping changes don’t stick. Saying “I’m going to lose 20 pounds this year” on January 1 doesn’t work because it’s a pretty giant goal and it doesn’t address what is involved in actually losing those 20 pounds. What Ms. Arnold suggests is that instead you make microresolutions throughout the year, turning things into habits and slowly shifting yourself closer to reaching your goals.
I’ve had some success with large, sweeping changes (see: “The Life-Changing Art of Tidying Up”) and I’ve had some failures (see: “It Starts With Food”). But in general I think that what Ms. Arnold is proposing makes a whole lot of sense. I’ve done it a few times without really realizing it. For example, every night before bed I get out my workout clothes for the next day. Every night. So every morning I can easily shift into my workout gear without banging open drawers. Yes, probably once every three or four weeks the alarm goes off and I look at my running shoes, reset my alarm and go back to sleep, but the vast majority of the time, I go work out. It’s now a habit, and it feels weird to not do it.
The book is split into two parts: the rules of the microresolutions, and examples of microresolutions by common topic areas. Microresolutions need to be specific and easy. So a microresolution is not ‘eat healthier,’ because huh? What does that mean? Are you really going to change everything overnight? No. A better example would be ‘I will eat salad at lunch every work day.’ It doesn’t mean you’ll ONLY eat salad at lunch, and by limiting it to work days, you leave yourself some wiggle room for weekends or vacation, but it’s easy, you know what you’re doing, and it has a cue (lunch, work day). It’s kind of a cool idea, although it requires some patience, for sure.
The second half of the book I didn’t find to be AS useful, because a few of the areas aren’t really big problem ones for me. However, the first chapter of the second section, on sleep, resonated so much that I shifted one of my first two microresolutions to focus on increasing my sleep. I’ve also made a note in the to-do app I use to check in on my resolutions, and choose new ones.
One note that I would warn on – the section on losing weight is full of a lot of bull shit. The author reiterates a lot of ‘common sense’ ideas about why people gain and lose weight that aren’t actually supported by evidence, and in many cases are actively refuted by science. Like the idea that it’s ‘simple math’ as to why people gain weight (ignoring that two people can eat literally exactly the same food and still have vastly different weight gains or losses). So that definitely gave me pause, because what else in the book isn’t fact-based? But I’m willing to ignore that junk chapter in favor of the fact that the first half offers up what could be some useful advice. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Most of us are familiar with the concept that breaking up goals into smaller milestones is usually more effective. This book goes much further with that idea, focusing on changing small behavioral patterns in order to achieve a goal. The first part of the book covers the concept of a "microresolution" and helps you understand and identify where goal-setting goes wrong, why most of us give up on our resolutions after a short time. The second part of the book is subdivided into common areas that most people try to improve: sleep, diet, exercise, relationships, cleanliness and organization, punctuality etc. I got many many ideas from her examples for my own life. She does an awesome job of identifying the potential pitfalls in certain areas and explains how you can tweak your microresolutions to adapt with you.
The book is well-written and the concepts are very easy to understand and apply toward your own life. I feel like I'm constantly trying to self-improve with only marginal progress and this book made me very excited for REALLY getting to the root of change. This book is a "keeper" and one I will recommend to anyone who is interested in keeping resolutions and not just making them.
I received an ARC from Goodreads Giveaways in exchange for my review.