How to Change Your Life for the Better

It’s human nature to seek to improve one’s own life.

Photo by Scott Broome on Unsplash

The desire to do and have more begins in childhood. It only gets stronger as we get older and our ego becomes moulded by our successes and failures.

Whether you seek to achieve career aspirations, improve your physique or meditate more frequently, each of these goals is underpinned by one true desire: to make our lives better by bringing us happiness.

When we set these goals for ourselves, we often think of them in terms of ends rather than means.

The goal to get your dream job translates to having an income of $80,000; we see getting in shape as having a six-pack and bulging biceps, career success as having our books published.

Yet focusing on the end goal is akin to merely daydreaming about achieving these goals. To truly change one’s life for the better, we have to put in consistent effort and make progress towards our aspirations.

Luckily, this progress can be made incrementally and steadily and doesn’t require a drastic change in your way of life. Instead, it requires being committed to your goal enough that you’re willing to make daily micro-adjustments to stay on track.

Here’s how.

Start Where You Are

Throughout my career, I’ve been fortunate enough both to mentor others and be mentored by people I greatly admire. One of my personal mentors was a yoga teacher, and she was helping me work my way up to being able to do a free-standing headstand.

Each time I started to feel braced and stable, and extend my legs skyward, my core would give out or I would teeter off balance and collapse. Week after week, I’d try to transition into a headstand and would end up sprawled out on the floor, usually following a dramatic thud.

I started to make excuses. I’d say that I’d be able to do a headstand “when my core is stronger,” or “when my shoulder is fully healed.”

As my mentor pointed out to me, my core would only get stronger by continuing to attempt the things that challenged those muscles, and that I only thought about my old shoulder injury when I struggled to do something.

Starting to make our lives better — to meet the goals we’ve set for ourselves — requires starting exactly where we are. There’s no need to wait around for something to change. In fact, nothing is going to change unless we change it.

You are the catalyst for your own improvement, not the product of it.

Take Baby Steps

‘We stay with our own little plot of earth and trust that it can be cultivated, that cultivation will bring it to its full potential. Even though it’s full of rocks and the soil is dry, we begin to plow this plot with patience.’ — Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You

Once you decide to get started, there are two important things you need to do:

1. Get clear with yourself about what a better life looks like for you.
2. Ask yourself what needs to be added and removed from your life to make that happen.

Nobody’s asking you to reinvent the wheel in an afternoon. In fact, trying to get everything done all at once is likely to lead to an early burnout. (Or a nervous breakdown.)

It’s better to start small. Begin with manageable micro-adjustments that you can work on every single day, bringing you gradually closer to the goal you’re chasing.

For example:

• If you want to be an author, try to spend 10 fewer minutes on social media each day, and use those 10 minutes to write.
• If you want to get in shape, start by trying to go to the gym for 30 minutes 2–3 times per week, and choose water over beer for your beverage at dinner.
• If you want a new career, create a job alert for certain keywords on a site like Indeed.com so that you get an email whenever something that’s a potentially good fit gets posted.

Instead of trying to change your entire life in a single day,

I recommend keeping a journal and documenting these goals, as having them in writing will help to hold you accountable (more on accountability in a moment).

On top of that, when you’re feeling stuck or unmotivated, simply writing out a simple, manageable goal will remind you that its within reach.

And, when you begin achieving more and more of these little micro-tasks on a daily basis, you’ll become closer and closer to your long-term aspirations.

Turn Your Baby Steps Into Lasting Changes

Taking baby steps will get you going in the right direction, but to make sure you’re staying on the right track, you’ll want to put a few ground rules into place:

• Be Consistent. When you’re working to implement a serious change in your life, you have to make them a part of your day-to-day routine. Maybe you decide to work on your book as soon as you wake up; perhaps you choose to meditate every night before bed. Whatever timeslot you decide on, whatever routine you adopt, stick with it.
• Hold yourself accountable. Accountability is crucial when working toward your goals. If the only person you have to answer to is yourself, it will be incredibly easy to rationalize putting things off or simply not pushing yourself to make progress. If you have a mentor in your life — someone who can provide insight from a place of wisdom and experience — see if they’re willing to become your accountability partner. Otherwise, try to find someone else working toward the same goal who’ll keep you in check, making sure you’re staying on track.
• Have rewards… and consequences. When you miss your goals or get off track, don’t just shrug it off and say that you can start again next week. Having consequences that you’ll want to avoid, like staying in on a Friday night to catch up on the work you misseed, will help keep you on track. On the flipside, reinforce progress by building rewards into your routine. As you meet your goals and make notable progress, find time to celebrate.
• Don’t bite off more than you can chew. When you’re working to incorporate change into your daily routine, it’s important that you don’t try to take on too much at once. That’s a surefire way to experience burnout and disappointment. Take it steady and conserve your energy. It’s a long journey.

And that’s all it takes. Start making changes today that you’ll thank yourself tomorrow.

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