How many times have you heard, said, or thought this sentence?
A new year, a new beginning, a new cycle. Natural in budget time, with the panettone still on the stomach, to flood the brain with good intentions even if it were Venice in a period of high water. But when the usual routine starts over and old habits winking invitingly, it is very easy to postpone any good willing project to never again.
The reality is that change is not easy and for it to be successful it needs strong motivation and rigid rules.
Here is a short but effective to-do list to change successfully:
1. Identify your reasons
Human beings generally don’t like change. You may have a deep desire for a certain result but deeply hate the process. Everyone wants to have a lean and toned body, but not everyone is willing to commit to diet and exercise.
For this reason, to implement a real and lasting change it is essential to undertake the path for the right reasons and with deep motivation. The reason must be positive: you must understand who the person you want to become is, in order to have a precise direction in the decisions to be made. While the motivation must be so deep as to push you to put into practice the actions necessary to build your life project every day.
2. Make a long-term plan
Change needs a long-term strategy: estimate the time and mental, physical, and economic resources you need to reach your goal and then double them, just to kill any false expectations in the bud. Changing means embarking on a new and exciting path, but as such also full of difficulties.
3. Focus on habits
Habits produce the results. Ask yourself what are the fundamental habits you need to change and which ones you need to create to experience the desired change. It will be difficult to change them but once you train them they will make that change natural and it will be much harder for you to go back to the old life at that point.
4. Stop telling yourself stories
If you make excuses and tell yourself that you won’t make it, you are ensuring failure. The life you have at this moment is the fruit of all the decisions and routines you have set in motion so far, plus a few strokes of luck and bad luck. Your new life requires the same thing: if you don’t believe it, you never will.
5. Stop saying I don’t have time
Whenever you say I don’t have time to think about a life change, you are giving up control of your existence. Stop telling yourself that you don’t have time: define an agenda that allows you to change, eliminating all those wasted time that block you. Often it would be enough to turn off the telephone and television to recover precious time. Spend time on change and the change will pay off.
6. Act as you’ve already made that change
Your old comfort zone, your mental patterns, the people around you who will never have the courage to do what you want to do, are powerful deterrents to change. Imagine that you have arrived on the other side: how will you use your time and energy? It doesn’t matter if you are still in your old life: the important thing is to do something different every day to get where you want.
Changing is not easy at all, so you have to arm yourself with energy, determination, and patience. Push until you get the first results, those will be the glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel that will take you to your new life.
