Start small - making changes
Most of us want to change something about our lives.
Most of us would like more happiness, a deeper sense of contentment or just more time to be present with the people we love. Perhaps we’d like to be fitter or have more fulfilling relationships… So what stops us making these changes? Sure, there’s good old inertia, but on top of that tends to be the feeling that it’s all too hard, too much, too daunting. Can we break out of that “stuckness”?
Of course we can – it’s surprisingly simple - START SMALL!
You’ll notice I said simple, not easy. Maybe we can make it easy too – let’s try.
We tend to focus on the end goal and we look there from where we are and become discouraged when it seems too far away, impossible. From this perspective, it hardly seems worth trying and, often, we don’t. There’s a good reason the now famous BBC initiative, “Couch to 5k” was not called “couch to Marathon”. The first step in making changes is to make the goals realistic. Aim low.
There’s nothing wrong, of course, with big ambitions if they provide our overarching motivation. But the motivation to actually take action needs, for most of us, to be more immediate and more easily achievable. So, if you want to swim the English Channel, you first need to be able to swim a length of your local pool. So making your goal swimming a length of the pool is more likely to get you in the water than focusing on the goal of swimming to France.
Starting small…
All this may seem blindingly obvious, but it requires a shift in our normal mindset. Quantum change is very rare. Yes, there are people who achieve huge changes overnight, but these are generally not good role models for our own journey. The vast majority of people achieve their goals by small incremental changes over time. If your aim is to learn meditation, for example, do you think you stand a better chance of embedding this new habit if, on day one, you enter a 7 day meditation retreat, rather than trying to meditate for 5 mins and then doing the same the next day and the day after that?
Think about this: If your aim is to be a better person and the constituent parts of what you consider “better” are, for example, you will be less angry, you will be healthier and you will spend more quality time with your kids; then are you more likely to change effectively, actually become a better person, if, on day one, you smile at the person who just cut in front of you in traffic while your blood boils, you only eat salad that day and you devote 3 hours to playing Lego with your 5 year old while you can hear emails pinging into your inbox… or… you take three deep breathes, then count to 10 and don’t explode one out of the four times your anger is triggered, you eat one fewer candy bar and drink one fewer beers that day and spend an extra 10 minutes with your kid and delight in really listening as he tells you about his day?
“Start small and easy. What little change can you begin now? Write it down and consider how you might begin to make that change. Don’t rush, enjoy the journey!”
Just 0.1%…
Being 0.1% better every day is better than being 30% better for one day. Those small 0.1% changes add up – after a month, you’re a 3% better person and after a year you’re a 36% better person and it’s not just sustainable, it compounds! It gets better and better. That’s the power of small changes.
There are a bunch of fantastic life hacks that will assist in making your desire to change a reality. Use the new habit forming techniques taught by Professor BJ Fogg, make yourself accountable by telling your friends what you plan to do, put motivational sayings around your home to encourage yourself, enter that race, go to that meeting, sign up for that course… but the most effective thing you can do is start small, no matter how big your end goal is.
A few ways to begin…
When you’re trying to create new habits, embed new practices, be realistic and kind to yourself – it may seem counterintuitive, but aim low and you’ll stand a far better chance of it sticking.
Practice listening! It’s a skill that can be learned and improved. Make sure you’re fully present in a conversation and then make a conscious effort to listen and really hear what your counterpart is saying, rather than just waiting for an opportunity to make your point.
If you work sitting down at a screen, put a post it note above your monitor that just says “Stand Up” and, every time you notice it, stand up and, if you have time, walk a few steps.
Set an alarm for mid-evening (before you shut down your phone for the night, which you do, don’t you?) as a reminder to ask yourself this: “What three things went well today?” As you think of them, say “thank you” to yourself.
Before you go to any gathering, think of your best/funniest story appropriate to the people who you’re going to be with and practice telling the story in the most compelling way. Think of yourself as a stand-up comic honing a piece of your show. This will give you the confidence to tell your story in the best way – keep it punchy!
