Stop chasing big goals in love and life — try this 'tiny experiments' method instead

Whether its our careers, health or relationships, we often set the bar too high and end up disappointed. This new way of thinking may just see real results, says Anne-Laure Le Cunff

Adopting the 'Tiny Experiments' approach to change can boost your health and love life

A goal can be easily achieved under specific conditions. You want to buy a car that fits three children and costs less than €25,000? Do the research, buy the car. The destination is known and the path is clear.

But most of the things we want don’t work like that. How do you figure out what kind of career you want? Become the kind of parent you didn’t have? Decide what ‘healthy’ looks like for you?

The destination keeps shifting as you grow. That’s why chasing goals doesn’t work for career, relationships, health, and life’s most important questions.

The experimental mindset

Scientists have a different relationship to uncertainty. They work with it. They wonder if something will work, then design experiments to find out. Whatever the outcome, their only goal is to learn.

This is the ‘experimental mindset’. It uses your brain’s ability to generate predictions about what will happen next, and to learn when those predictions turn out to be wrong. Most of us experience this as failure and try to avoid that feeling, so we stick to the plan, we double down.

The experimental mindset does the opposite. Instead of asking, ‘Am I there yet?’, it asks, ‘What can I learn?’ This helps you try new approaches, pay attention to what happens, and change direction when the evidence points somewhere new. That way, you won’t be copying someone else’s blueprint

So what does this look like when you’re weighing up whether to leave a job, if a relationship has a future, or how to rebuild your social life after a big move? It all starts with designing a tiny experiment.

How to design a tiny experiment

Experimentation begins with observation. Spend time observing your own life. I like to pretend I’m an anthropologist for 24 hours, taking field notes. What gives me energy? What drains it? Who are the people I love talking to? What are the ideas I can’t stop thinking about? Jot it all down on your phone or in a notebook.

Having coached thousands of people through this process, I can guarantee that you will spot areas of your life ripe for experimentation. Those observations become the starting point for your first experiment.

The great news is you don’t need a lab. If you strip an experiment down to its most essential features, it is just two decisions: Something to test and a trial period. Every experiment can be reduced to one line: ‘I will [action] for [duration].’ That’s your protocol.

Your career as a laboratory

We spend a huge part of our lives at work, and our career is deeply tied to our sense of identity, which makes it feel like a high-stakes area to experiment with.

Add economic uncertainty to the mix and for most of us the instinct is: ‘I can’t afford to try things.’

But staying stuck in the wrong career is also costly. So rather than waiting until you feel ready to make a big change, try something small enough that it doesn’t feel like a risk: ‘I will spend 30 minutes a day reading newsletters’; ‘For a month, I will block out one afternoon a week for deep creative work’; ‘I will have three coffee chats with people in jobs I’m curious about this quarter.’

None of these require overhauling your life, yet they can lead to unexpected opportunities.

Experimenting in relationships

We fall in to patterns with the people closest to us — who calls whom, what you talk about, how you spend time together — and those patterns can calcify.

Applying an experimental mindset is about noticing those defaults and testing whether something different might be better: For example, replacing one weekly catch-up call with doing an activity together for six weeks, or contacting one person you’ve lost touch with each week for a month.

You won’t know which of these will help, but that’s the point. Each experiment teaches you something about what helps nurture the relationships that matter most to you and what doesn’t.

Whether you’re training for a marathon or trying to sleep better, the approach is the same: Rather than following a formulaic plan with borrowed goals, design your own.

The same mindset works for romantic relationships. And you don’t have to experiment on your own. Parents can design experiments with their children, such as replacing screentime before bed with reading together for two weeks, or letting a teenager cook dinner once a month.

Couples can test new date-night ideas; friends can commit to trying something new at the same time. In fact, some of the most rewarding experiments are the ones you run with someone else.

What does ‘healthy’ look like for you?

Wellness is the area most saturated with one-size-fits-all goals.

And this is where the gap between generic advice and individual reality is often widest. What works for one person’s body, schedule, and stress levels is different from what works for another’s. Yet we keep importing other people’s goals as if they were universal prescriptions.

The experimental mindset can help reframe your entire relationship to wellness: Instead of adopting someone else’s definition of healthy and forcing yourself to comply, you do experiments to figure out what works for your body, your mind, and your life.

Whether you are training for a marathon or just trying to sleep better, the approach is the same: Rather than following a formulaic plan with borrowed goals, you design your own.

• Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World, by Anne-Laure Le Cunff, is published by Profile.

The Guardian