How many times have you craved a change in your life but found yourself months, or even years, later still craving the change yet not having changed a thing?

Maybe you’ve been wanting to grow your side hustle enough to quit your full-time job, carve out space to go to a weekly yoga class, invest more time in deep friendships, write the novel that’s storyline has been inserting itself into your dreams, or meet your soul through daily meditation.

Whatever it is, making a change in our lives, be it gargantuan or picayune, requires a shift in our routine.

And left to our default programming, change in our routine is pretty darn unlikely.

Our daily behavior is largely unconscious, driven by years of laying down neural programming so as to conserve precious mental and physical energy by making the lion’s share of our lives rote.

But if we don’t want to look back at our lives years from now and wonder how it is that we’ve still not started [meditating/walking/writing our novel/taking Fridays off] or whatever it is we’ve really been jonesing to add to our lives, we’ve gotta interrupt the default programming.

I’ve got a quick story about how I did this a few years ago when it came to making a change in my work schedule that revolutionized my levels of productivity, ease, and joy.

A few years ago, someone mentioned taking a full day off from scheduled appointments every week. I knew immediately that I wanted that.

The only problem was, when I looked at my schedule, I had appointments scheduled every weekday for months out on my calendar.

(I could have canceled or rescheduled everything to free a day up for myself immediately but the admin of that felt more stressful than not having the free day.)

But instead of just going back to “this is just the way things are” I interrupted myself on behalf of my desire for more spaciousness and asked myself one of the most important questions ever:

“How could it be possible for me to have what I want?”

I kept clicking that little right arrow on the weekly view of my Google calendar until 10 weeks in the future there was an open Tuesday (the day I’d chosen as my appointment-free day.)

And I claimed it! I grabbed that Tuesday, blocked off the day as unavailable, and did the same for every Tuesday from that day forward.

Just because I couldn’t have my spacious Tuesdays now didn’t mean I couldn’t have them ever.

So, what change are you craving for your schedule?

For me it’s going to a yoga class every week. I’ve been wanting to do that for over 6 months and I still haven’t.

Why? Because I haven’t gone forward in my calendar and pre-claimed the time, so by the time I get to living the actual week in which I might go to yoga, the time has already been taken up by something else.

My kids go back to school in a couple of weeks so I know if I want to reset my desired life rhythm for the fall, I’m not gonna wait until mid-September and get around to getting the stuff I want on my schedule only after all the school forms have been submitted, all the new sneakers have been purchased, and my girls are back in their routine.

Nope. I’m going into my calendar and pre-claiming the time for what I want on there in a month or so NOW. So that way, when I get to the first week that the girls are back in school, I’ll be able to thank my past self (me, right now at the beginning of August) for having the foresight to give me the gift of setting aside time for a weekly yoga class.

Map out your desired life rhythm now.

Look ahead in your calendar for the first opportunity to lock it in (or make adjustments over time.)

The key here is to pre-claim the time so that your default programming doesn’t fill it in with your old version of your life.

New versions of our lives and ourselves require our current self gifting our future self time for new behavior.

As summer rounds it’s way into the final weeks for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, do your future self a solid by grabbing some of that Virgo season time now and setting yourself up for a life closer to the one you crave.

Peace, love, and planning,

Kate