Welcome 2025! In January in the past we have chosen books that are about goal setting and achieving success and being the you, you want to be. Last January we selected, “The Real Work” by Adam Gopnic and we have discussed his book throughout the year several times as we have applied certain key points to our lives Linda says that our January selections really stick with her and have helped her to focus on herself and think about what she wants out of life and what is going to make me happy. Our book this month is Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones. This book is designed to reshape the way you think about progress and success, and give you the tools and strategies you need to transform your habits--whether you are a team looking to win an Olympic medal, redefine an industry, or simply an individual who wishes to quit smoking, lose weight, reduce stress, or achieve any other goal. The author, James Clear is a writer and speaker focused on habits, decision making, and continuous improvement. Atomic Habits has sold over 20 million copies worldwide and has been translated into more than 60 languages. Clear is known for his ability to distill complex topics into simple behaviors that can be easily applied to daily life and work. Here, he draws on the most proven ideas from biology, psychology, and neuroscience to create an easy-to-understand guide for making good habits inevitable and bad habits impossible. Along the way, readers are inspired and entertained with true stories from Olympic gold medalists, award-winning artists, business leaders, life-saving physicians, and star comedians who have used the science of small habits to master their craft and vault to the top of their field. It can sound heady, but it is an easy book to read and there are specific steps and components to the plan. The foundation of the book and the reason for the title, it was a small change that can lead to huge success in reaching your goals. Linda says she feels Nancy has incorporated many of Clear’s suggestions in her life, even before she read the book. Nancy said she did like the book. She was already familiar with a lot of the research about habits and habit linking. She liked Clear’s emphasis on linking habits to create a system of habits. In fact, Nancy plans to purchase the book so she can underline it and spend more time applying Clear’s concepts. Linda likes how Clear links identity to habits. He writes, “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity. This is one reason why meaningful change does not require radical change. Small habits can make a meaningful difference by providing evidence of a new identity. And if a change is meaningful, it is actually big. That’s the paradox of making small improvements.” She likes his emphasis on the big impact of small change. Linda asks Nancy about her experience changing her identity from a university professional to her retired life. Nancy does also like Clear’s emphasis on identity. She has done a lot of reading about political identity and thinks it is central to how people behave and what they believe. She indicates that shifting her identity from being a university professional was not difficult, but totally embracing the identity she wants, as a writer, as been harder for her to claim because she cannot claim certain successes in her writing. Linda says she has done a good job surrounding herself with people who do claim the identity of writer and that is good. Nancy agrees that has been reinforcing for her. Linda says she has always thought she is not a tech savvy person and so when her church needed people to join the tech team, she thought this was not for her. Finally, she realized her self-labeling was limiting her, because of this book! Nancy likes Clear’s use of identity as in: I am a healthy person and walking every day is something a healthy person does. Linny said she used that in deciding not to eat another Christmas cookie. Clear breaks down how to create a good habit and the inversion of that on how to break a bad habit. The Four Laws are: 1) Make it Obvious, 2) Make it Attractive, 3) Make it Easy, and 4) Make it Satisfying. And then the converse is true also – make the bad habit invisible, make the bad habit unattractive. Linny says one of her goals was to be able to respond to Red Cross emergencies, but her phone and laptop were dead, keeping her from responding. Her husband bought her a charging cable for her car so she can now charge them on her way to the emergency. Linny says Nancy has made her workspace attractive and that makes it easy and satisfying for her to do her work. Nancy says she is scheduling time for writing to get back into her writing habit and that is helping her. Linny reminds Nancy that Clear says the habit commitment is for no more than 2 minutes. So, she should just commit to 2 minutes of writing. Linda liked making the habit obvious. For example, she says how about not buying potato chips but instead buying fruit and putting them in a bowl that is very visible. Linny liked the idea of flow state and how Clear talks about flow as a part of goal setting. For example, playing a tennis opponent that is too easy means you will probably not play as well as you could. If you play someone much better, it can be discouraging. Playing someone a little better makes you concentrate and is likely to lead to a flow state. Nancy says when she gets bored of a habit, it is easy to stop doing them. She feels like her meditation practice was boring to her, rather than engaging. That is part of why she dropped it. She is going to try to restart her meditation practice. Linny reiterates a short time period, like one minute, is a good goal. Linda likes Clear’s acknowledgement that any habit can become boring. Think of Olympic athletes who are performing the same thing over and over. The idea is to just keep showing up. Nancy says, it’s okay to “fail,” but Clear says he works hard to not break his habit two days in a row, though. Linny is working on making her office attractive. She talked about taking the change one step, 1% at a time. Nancy liked Clear’s story about a 15-foot error in pointing a ship from New York harbor and not correcting it can lead the ship to arrive, not in Portugal, but to Africa. Linny says she would recommend reading this book slowly so that the reader can spend time with the concepts, journal about it, think about it, and apply it. Nancy says she plans to purchase the book so she can underline it and spend more time so she can apply some of the concepts. Nancy also liked, overall, the idea that habits are nonconscious and that habits remove the cognitive load of “Am I going to do this?” and the emotional load of “Do I feel like doing it?” Nancy says the book make her think about her identity as an athlete. She has never thought of herself as an athlete, but over the last couple years, people will tell her she is athletic, but she disagrees. It has happened enough times, that she is thinking maybe she is an athlete, even though it is a foreign concept. She also doesn’t feel she has a level of prowess required of athletes, but maybe it is more in the doing, rather than the level at which she is performing. It’s still a shirt that doesn’t fit, though. It’s interesting when other people see an identity for her that you don’t recognize in yourself. Linny thinks it’s exciting.