The 1-Minute Agreement

In this episode of Practicing Connection, we explore the "one-minute agreement," a simple yet powerful practice for building consistency and overcoming inertia. Coral shares how this approach can help tackle big goals by breaking them into bite-sized, manageable steps. 

Transcript

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[music] Hi, thanks for listening to the Practicing Connection podcast. I'm Jessica. My co-host Coral is here as well. Today we'll be talking about the one-minute agreement, and Coral will be sharing a practice with us. Hi, Coral, how are you? Hey, Jessica, I'm doing well. Thanks so much. I was just thinking right before we started recording about some of the books that I've been reading with my little guy. My son is two, his name is Kai. There are just some things that we reflect on and that come up thematically in a lot of these really sweet little books. One of them we were reading last night, it's about Donald Duck and his garden. It's actually a book that my grandmother gave me many years ago. Donald Duck--[?] also a sailor. Totally. He's actually a gardener in this episode or in this micro story, which is really funny, but he's trying to have success growing all these seeds and Chip and Dale keep coming and eating the seeds, and he finally figures out through many, many, many tries to have a successful method of appeasing his friends that like to eat his garden, but to grow things I just thought it was a really sweet moral of the story of just sometimes you need to be creative to have things grow and flourish. Even if you get sidetracked along the way by some chipmunks. That's what we've been reading lately. I love that. I love the playfulness with that. I love the lessons, the playfulness. It's just a heartwarming thing to be noticed, to be present with. I've actually been in a bit of a heartwarming situation for myself. I've been working with a group that is just so ready to work together. A lot of them didn't know each other at all. They're strangers to each other before we started getting together, but not only are they ready to work together, they're all genuinely interested in getting to know each other on a personal and professional level as well. I've often on this podcast quoted Chad Littlefield's clever phrase, connection before content, because I have witnessed how powerful taking time to connect can be to groups and teams that are trying to get some things done together, trying to address issues in a community. I rarely come across a group who 100% wholeheartedly is into it and asking me for more of it. It's really exciting for me. I don't know. It's been heartwarming and I've been like,"Oh my gosh, you guys, you're way ahead of me here." Normally I have to convince people a little bit to spend some time getting to know each other more personally and they are so here for it. That sounds like such a fun team. As you're saying that I'm reflecting on different spaces that I've been in when there is that synergy and just this really good vibe and energy and it just feels good to be part of it. To be able to steward, guide a group, I'm sure that's been a lot of fun to work with those folks. Yes. I want to be clear. I love all of the groups that I have worked with before, and I enjoy all of those projects. It's exciting to see the synergy from the get-go when normally it takes much longer to develop that if ever sometimes, yes. Absolutely. We would love to hear what's inspiring our listeners. Please share what's inspiring you by clicking the "send us a text message" at the top of the description of this episode. When you click the link, your text messaging app will open and you'll see a seven-digit number and the words "do not remove." Type your message after that and click send. Don't remove that number or we won't receive your message. To protect your privacy, we won't see your phone number and we can't text you back, but we'll share your feedback on a future episode. If you're listening on a computer, you can email us a practicingconnection@oneop.org. Let us know what's inspiring you right now.[music] Let's learn more about this one-minute agreement. Coral, can you tell us a little more about the practice and why you chose it? Absolutely. The one-minute agreement is all about making big goals bite-sized to help us overcome inertia and find consistency. I first came across a version of it in my early twenties. I was racing collegiate triathlon at the University of Florida. There were many times where, whether collectively or individually, just it would feel like such a chore to get started on a training session. Our coach, Coach Will, is a great guy. He would encourage that even if we weren't feeling it, so to speak, to just head out for 10 minutes of a training session. He would call this the 10-minute agreement. Teammates often called it the 10-minute trap and you'll see why here in a little bit. The whole idea really is just to get started. This one-minute agreement is all about how can we make this even more bite-sized than the 10-minute agreement. I love this idea. It reminds me of a supervisor I had in the past long time ago, whose solution to not feeling it was to do it anyway. I always admired that because, I don't know, when I'm not feeling it, I'm not feeling it. I don't want to do it. She didn't want to do it either. She's like, but I need to, so I'm just going to do it. I'd love to learn more. Please walk us through the one-minute agreement. You got it. First off, figure out your goal. Let's say for just a hypothetical example, that you want to be a published author. What habit is going to get you there? Typically a great start if you want to be an author is to start writing. How do we get started with writing consistently? I know a lot of folks may find whether you're doing blogs or a book or any manner of things, this writer's block can be a really real thing that we experience. How do we make it so bite-sized to the point where it would be silly to say,"Oh, I can't do that." We can do anything for one minute. The one-minute agreement for becoming a published author is perhaps writing one minute a day. I joked about the 10-minute trap from my collegiate triathlon days. The sneaky thing about the consistency of overcoming activation energy with the one-minute agreement is that we so often will just find our groove, whether it be one minute, three minutes, whatever your version of this is, we'll often just overcome that activation energy and find a groove and end up going far beyond that timeframe. That's it. That's the one-minute agreement. How beautifully simple. I remember from, there was a show called The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and she had a version of this and that was, you can do anything for 10 seconds. I think this can work at-- and that was a sitcom, so it's not all real or anything. I'm sure it wasn't based in evidence or research, but I'm just saying this is right. If you need to get started, you can just promise yourself, you know what, I can stop after 10 seconds if I want to. You can go as low as you need to, I would imagine. Yes, sorry, I'm getting ahead of myself because I do love this so much, but you bring up such a great point, Jessica, that I neglected to mention. It is that the commitment is only for one minute. If you don't feel like it beyond that one minute, you've done your minute, you've met the commitment, you've met your parameters for success. That is the win. Then you can just move on with your day after that one minute and not feel any sense of guilt or remorse or like you didn't hit the mark because the commitment is truly only for that minute. That is a really important piece of this for helping you define and find success consistently. I feel like you can also celebrate that you staved off procrastination. Even if you only worked on it for a minute, you didn't procrastinate and you didn't procrastinate the whole thing. You actually made yourself get started. I think that's something to celebrate. 1,000%. That's it for this episode. Thanks so much for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, click the share button in your podcast app to share it with a friend. We'll be back next week with a practice for coworking. What is that? You'll find out next week. Until then, keep practicing.[music] The Practicing Connection podcast is a production of OneOp and is supported by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, US Department of Agriculture, and the Office of Military Family Readiness Policy, US Department of Defense under Award Number 2023-48770-41333.[music]