No matter who you are, there will be things about your life that you would like to change. Even Richard Branson probably isn’t 100% happy with every aspect of his life and he’s a millionaire playboy. What chance to the rest of us stand?
This might sound depressing, but actually it’s a necessary part of the human condition. You see, it’s dissatisfaction with the status quo that motivates us to move forward and to effect change. Without that ‘itch’ we would quickly become stagnant and that would limit our accomplishments and achievements.
The difference between a happy person and a dissatisfied person though, is that happy people are constantly striving to improve their situation and working to make life better rather than surrendering and letting things get slowly worse. So how do you bring about the changes you want in life and what does it take to actually have an impact on the world you inhabit? Here are some tips to help you bring about positive change.
Want to Change
The first and most important thing required for making changes in your life is actually wanting to change and often you’ll find that you’re unaware of the emotional factors that are holding you back. Many people for instance won’t take a chance on a career change, on asking someone out on a date, or on launching a project, because they are afraid of failure. They don’t want to try, because they’re afraid it won’t go right. Likewise, many people can’t quit smoking because they actually don’t want to – either they enjoy the process of smoking itself too much, or they rely on it emotionally as a way to deal with their problems.
Before you can begin to make the real changes in your life then, you need to make sure you really want them which means thinking about the things you want to change, and maybe even talking to a professional or using CBT to change your thinking. If you’re struggling to motivate yourself to quit smoking try using ‘over exposure’ – smoke twenty in a row and then see if you still like them too much to give up.
Setting Goals
How you set your goals can have a big impact on how successful you are in accomplishing them. Firstly, you need to ensure that the goals you set are things you really want and are passionate about (see above). Next though, you need to make sub goals to approach the things you really want and break down your ambition into smaller more manageable chunks. For instance then, if you want to lose lots of weight then you need to think about that overarching goal, but you also need to think about your training routine and what you are going to do on a daily basis to make that a reality. For now, your goal is not ‘lose 10kg’, but rather ‘do this workout every week without fail’. Once you know the smaller steps you need to take to work toward your overall goal, you should focus on accomplishing these and not letting distractions get in the way. Then you’ll find that the overall goal takes care of itself.
Try
One of the biggest reasons a lot of us fail to see the changes we want in our lives is because we are too afraid to try or we assume that whatever we want to achieve lies outside of our limitations. If you don’t try, then you will never know – and even if you try and don’t succeed the experience will make you more likely to succeed next time, and the focus and the challenge will give you hope which can help to improve your life right away.