Recently, I’ve had a number of conversations about how one manifests change in their own life, and I’ve found I actually have built a system over the past few years that I can express pretty coherently! After like ten or so tries explaining it to people in the last month[[2]], I think I’ve got it down. I call them…

Julie Projects

They can be about almost anything and about any topic related to the self or one’s existence and consist of 1) some guiding goal or direction, 2) some concrete focal point to look out for as a focus of change, and 3) a new thing one should do in those noticed moments. Together, these build into a cohesive way to regularly and consistently make small changes in my life and over years, creating a capacity to make my desires for change manifest upon myself!

Desires - Goals and Directions

The goal can be almost anything, based on a desire to be or change in some way. A way I want to be different, a behavior I want to change, a skill I want to gain, knowledge I want to have, etc. I usually find this to be my starting point, when I start to realize it's time for a new project.

I've had many, many sources for this desire over the years, almost as many as I've had projects! I’ve found it sometimes comes from frustrations with myself or the world, sometimes with curiosity, from noticing something in others, or from things I’ve read. This "change mining" thing is really important as well, but something I'd like to talk about more another time.

It’s 2019 and you’re in high school. Your lovely mother starts pointing out, very nicely, how you have a bad habit of talking over people in conversation, which not only affects how you come across but also impacts how others feel. You think about this for a little while, notice that really she’s quite right about this one, and get to work changing it.

It’s 2021, you’re in college, and you’re realizing you know jack shit about shoes. Bless their wonderful nerdy hearts that got you here today, but none of the people in your life have really helped you out here. You want to have style and an intentionality to your presence, and you’ve figured out lots of other parts like clothes and jewelry and makeup, so you’re pretty sure this is next.

Changes

Once I’ve found this desire for change in myself, I’ll start to plan out how to make it manifest in my life. I’ve found that the best way to do that is with small changes applied regularly, which will automatically become background habits over time and free you up for other things. The clearest way I can explain this process has two parts - the focal point and the action.

Focal Points

The focal point is something in particular, which you can notice the moment it happens. It’s the thing that actions will be keyed off of, and will be the thing you keep your eye out for all the time. The focal point can also be almost anything - a specific type of outfit on someone in a crowd, a way you sometimes hold yourself, a specific pattern of speech or relation you want to change, some pattern of thought you notice occasionally, a desire you sometimes have, or anything else that’s a part of the human experience and you can notice specifically when it comes up.

It’s late 2024 and you’ve noticed something about the way you ask questions, adding these dichotomies on the end. You find that when others do that, you feel it's much harder to answer the question genuinely for yourself. You notice your own frustration with that behavior pattern and want to do better in your actions, so you start paying extra attention to when you ask someone a question for those extra glued on sentences that shouldn't be there.

Actions

Finally, you have the new action - the different thing you nudge yourself to do, respond, or be. It’s where the change really comes in, the something different that's new from before. I've found that it shouldn't be extremely complicated to do or you won't be able to do it automatically, but beyond that it can be almost any behavior you can imagine.

It plays heavily off the other two parts - every situation will have a different specific action guided by the goal, and you know it’s time to do the action by when you notice the focal point happen in or around you!

It’s 2024 and you’re moving to a new city for your first real job. You had friends you really loved in school and are so sad to be leaving, but want to prove to yourself that you can make new ones better than anyone expects of you.
You think a bunch, talk to your friends, read, and make a plan. You’re going to say yes to everything you can with people, even if it’s out of your comfort zone. You’re going to grab the people you like - even the ones that aren't your favorites - and invite them back to more things in as tight a loop as you can.
You’ll keep sampling from the population, grabbing the best ones at each iteration, until you get the friends and relationships you so strongly desire back into your life.

It's early 2025 and you've recently broken up with your girlfriend of a few years. The breakup wasn't amazing - there were some really stupid miscommunications that should have been avoided, leading to unintentional harms. You know you can do better.
You decide to focus on the feeling of having something you want to say but being uncomfortable expressing it. Going forward, your policy will be maximal emotional transparency - be clear about what you're feeling and why, letting your friends and partners know even if it's uncomfortable, as that seems to be a better alternative than letting things simmer.

Errata

Small changes, a few at a time

I find that I only have a few projects at a time, and that this is actually pretty important for it to work well. It’s really important in building change to be able to notice the focal points as they come up in your day-to-day. For me at least,  I’ve found that it's only really possible to have a small number - maybe three to five[[1]] - queued at once or I can’t pay attention to them all. When this happens, a few naturally get deprioritized and fade away without being handled which is fine but can be unintentional. I will usually pick them up another time if they still matter, and the most important ones stay the course, but it’s something to keep in mind.

I also find scope to be pretty important here - breaking things down to little bits of change helps a lot to make it easier, even if they need to happen in pieces over a long time instead. If your focal point is just "work" or "style", that’s far too general to really notice when in particular you want to behave differently. If your action is to “be less overwhelming,” it’ll be hard to implement that in the middle of a conversation. On the other hand, if you are trying to notice when you are very excited in a conversation about engineering and when that happens, to slow down your speech and make space in the conversation for others, you’ll have a much better time actually making that manifest mid-conversation.

Hold Structure Lightly

As described here, this system could seem like one full of structure and specific steps and rigid parts, but that's an artifact of making it expressible and not my experience of things at all. I never have a list of active projects or anything, and I don't always know all these things for every project I'm running. This is more a set of ideas I've found to be very consistent, to a greater or lesser degree, in a lot of the things I've been thinking about and doing recently.

With that in mind, if you do adopt something like this, please hold the structure lightly. Don't worry about the shape as given here all that much. And anyway, if you want a psychofauna like this to stick, you'll need to allow it to be molded to the shape of your own brain! Tweak it and make it your own, I'd love to know all the different places you go with this.

Ebb and Flow

I find that my desire for different projects comes and goes over time, and that this is actually a really important part of how this works for me. I can only really focus on things consistently when they matter to me - when I really care about the goal - and as I get closer to achieving the goal, I start to care less and less about paying attention or making the changes required to see it through. In this way, projects often naturally decay off into obscurity after a little while.

I see this as simply making room for new projects to come in later, when I feel the need for them. This tapering-off leaves me free when I have another desire for change in the coming weeks. It's a natural part of the process and not something I worry about too much!

Closing Thoughts

While it's definitely still something that takes focus and work, I am reliably able to change parts of myself these days. I've found seeing myself change in ways that I want - feeling that level of agency not just over the world but over how I exist in it - to be incredibly rewarding. That's before I account for the upside of being able to change in so many enriching and useful ways!

I believe there's lots of different ways in the human experience to go about changing yourself regularly, and I'm really very interested in the experiences of others here. My friend Harper has also written up something about this recently! She takes a very different angle to me on this, and I really appreciate that perspective. Give that a read, she's full of incredibly fascinating ideas.

And please do reach out to me if you have your own thoughts! This is all super fascinating to me right now, and I'd love to know what you think.

However you go about it, if you have your own system or adopt something shaped like this, I really strongly recommend you keep an eye on how you feel about the way you show up in the world and make sure to keep engaging with the world in a way you feel happy with. Stay safe, and happy lasing!

[[1]]: I will say - I tend to feel I have a pretty low conversational working memory so your mileage may vary! 

[[2]]: Thank you so much to my lovely friends. Harper, Moshi, Sean, Zola, Sophia, Genevieve, Cait, and so many more - you all mean a lot to me and I'm really glad to have amazing people like you in my life who I can talk to about stuff like this