The Real Reason Why You Can’t Stick to Your New Habits

It’s the new year, which means most of us are at least thinking about something we’d like to do differently during this next trip around the sun.

Implementing something new often feels overwhelming and difficult simply because we go too big with it in our minds. We decide that we don’t need to start on the beginner level, jump straight into the intermediate level, get overwhelmed, quit, and wonder what’s wrong with us. To make matters worse, as we age, our minds get clogged up with the belief that we know how something will go — so we stop allowing ourselves to be bad at new things, or stop trying altogether.

Beginner’s Mind, or Shoshin in Japanese, is a Zen Buddhist concept that encourages openness, newness, and teachability in every experience, including every breath you take.

The Beginner’s Mind allows you to remain open and curious about experiences you would usually overload with expectation. Instead, you challenge yourself to find a way to relinquish control, the need to be right, and assumptions about how much you ought to know.

Essentially, a Beginner’s Mind is the only cure for failure. When you can approach experiences with curiosity, everything becomes an opportunity to learn — therefore, there is no such thing as failure. Every setback propels you toward the next teachable moment.

However, the pursuit of this mindset requires a lot of unlearning as well. Acknowledging what you don’t know or what makes you feel inadequate can be confronting, and the compulsion to be good and perfect is hard to shake when you’ve been its faithful servant for decades.

Beginner’s Mind can also be a great way to reenergize something that feels tired — like mundane parts of your job, household chores, or even talking to your partner. This is part of why conversational card games have become such a massive success. Of course they’re great for getting to know new people, but to explore the depths of people you live with and think you know everything about… well, that’s the Beginner’s Mind in action.

Arguably, this mindset should come most easily when you’re truly doing something for the first time. Yet unfortunately, it’s not that simple— especially if your ego is all tangled up in the outcome.

If you pick up knitting needles for the first time, but you have an idea that it should come easily because your mom knits, being new at this is going to feel way more difficult than if you were in full acceptance that you’re brand new at it. You make things harder than they need to be when your expectations of yourself are further along than your skills.

Instead of judging your attempts at something by their outcome, practice assessing your attitude toward them, and you will be practicing the Beginners Mind.