“I know who I am and who I may be, if I choose”. – Don Quixote, Miguel Cervantes

The way Cervantes puts it makes it sound easy, like it’s black and white. However, it is, in fact, the extreme grayness of choice that often scares us when making impactful choices in the first place. In a world where we desire certainty, making life-changing decisions is one of the most uncertain things we can do. But I don’t want to talk about the life-changing choices; they get way too much attention. I want to talk about the conscious, small choices that make up our everyday. They are just as important, but just a little less sexy. And, don’t worry, you’re already making good choices: you’re reading this.

You may wonder what I mean specifically by “conscious, small choices”. They are really anything that is not necessarily a part of a normal routine; choices in which we step outside our comfort zone to challenge ourselves. They are specific actions; not generalized, like bigger choices so often are.

Being determined to get in better shape is a big choice, while a small choice would be to wake up every other morning an hour earlier to go on a run. A big choice is to commit yourself to be more committed to your faith, while a corresponding small choice would be taking an hour out of your week (which contains 168 of them) to go to mass or temple or take time to just check in with yourself through reflection or meditation.

This may sound too easy, but we all know from experience that it’s not. There is something within all of us that holds us back. You can call it the Devil or laziness or nothing at all, but it is there nonetheless, pulling us away from improvement and towards complacency. It is when we battle through this complacency that we improve ourselves in our daily lives, reaching towards betterment. These voices of complacency and laziness whisper in our ears, telling us that these smaller choices we make are so insignificant that they are not even worth doing. These voices lie. The conscious, small choices we make every day are by no means small in the grand scheme of our mental makeup and attitude.

But perhaps we should respond to this mentality that feeds the idea that small choices are small or insignificant. So let’s call them what they really are: not small, but intentional.

Experts say it takes 17 days to create a habit. Or, to put it in a different perspective, an athletic friend once told me, “It takes two weeks to get into shape, and three days to get out of it.” So really, when it comes to the more intentional choices in life, it’s about consistency. Improvement and betterment take time. The voices will point out a lack of progress or betterment after only a short amount of time.

With the New Year always comes the flood of “New Year, New Me!”. Self-betterment is in vogue and so gym memberships sky rocket. However, in a desire for immediate satisfaction that plagues much of our society, the second someone believes that their choice has become insignificant, they abandon ship. So, while many enter the doors of gyms in January determined to get fit, many who do not see immediate results will eventually not come back. Of course, that is until the next year.

It is almost never easy, but when we find little ways in which we can improve our day-to-day lives, we need to be mindful of just that; we are improving ourselves.

Any move towards betterment is an amazing and admirable choice. Just don’t forget about the smaller steps that are often ignored in between the great leaps, because you won’t get nearly as far otherwise.