21 Days of Gratitude
Behavioral Insights
Everyone loves making New Year’s Resolutions, but only 8% of people keep them.
It takes a minimum of 21 days to build a new habit.
The most successful way to build habits is to start extremely small and add additional steps (one at a time) after you’ve mastered it.
A positive outlook can help you build and maintain healthy habits.
With a goal of helping Americans be 20% healthier by 2020, and these behavioral insights on our side, we realized that if we really wanted to create change, we couldn’t ask our audience to do a New Year’s resolution. In fact, we had to ask them not to — lest they fall into the trap of starting a healthy habit on January 1st and ending it by the 15th.
What’s better (and easier) than taking on an overwhelming habit on an arbitrary date with little chance of success? Building a positive mindset, one tiny little bit of gratitude at a time. Using empathy, encouragement, and positive thoughts, we created a 21-day social calendar to help our followers get into a frame of mind that could set them up for habit-building success, all year long.
The Invite to Opt-Out
First, we encouraged our followers to ditch their resolutions this year and participate in our 21-Day challenge instead.
The Daily Challenge
Then, over the next 21 days, we gave them one small life-hack a day that they could do to increase their gratitude and positive self-image.
Our social images were designed to be inspiring little snippets that could ideally be printed and posted around a person’s workspace as reminders to keep up the gratitude. Each image was accompanied by a corresponding challenge in the caption.
