How to Change

Allowing Yourself to Change for the Better

Know that all meaningful change must come from within. If you don’t trust yourself to change then no one will do it for you. Real change has to be driven from your own desire to be better, feel better, and have a positive outlook on life. Change can be scary, but it you love and trust yourself you can get through changes unscathed. Think of prior big changes in your life. Are they really scary in hindsight? How well did you handle the changes? What can you learn from them?

Practice positive affirmation. A positive outlook on life and the future is paramount to enacting change. You need to first change how you look at yourself before you can change. Think of it this way – if you want to change your love life to become more open, you’re not going to get very far if you believe “I don’t deserve to be in love.” Erase this negative language from your mind by practicing positive refrains every day, like: “I love myself,” “I can do this,” “I am capable of changing.” Don’t punish yourself or get upset if you have a negative thought. Instead, replace it with an opposing, positive one. If you thought – “Women never like me,” counter it with “I haven’t met a woman who I am compatible with yet.” Remember that as you change, you're not necessarily becoming somebody completely new. Instead, you're revealing other aspects of yourself.

Take care of your body and mind to make change easier. Even if your goals aren’t related to your body, being healthy and happy will make it much easier to focus on changing yourself for the better. Make sure that you are eating a balanced diet, getting 7 - 8 hours of sleep a night, and doing things you love to erase stress.

Recognize the behaviors or thoughts that you want to change. Don’t judge yourself or get upset at your faults. This is the time to look at your behaviors through a neutral lens, figuring out exactly what about yourself you want to change. There is a reason you want to change, and you need to do some exploring to find it. Having clear motivations will make it much easier to change. Some questions to ask include: Does this make me happy? What are the facts, not the feelings, about this situation? Why do I want to change? What is my end goal?

Make a plan of action. This needs to be specific and goal-oriented. By setting smaller, more manageable goals you “trick” your brain into thinking the task is easier, making it easier to commit to your project. For example, you might want to reform your love life and become less shy. Setting small goals makes the larger idea, “change your love life,” seem less daunting. Step 1: Think about what you want in a partner. What attracts you? What doesn’t? Make a list. Step 2: Think about what caused relationships to fail in the past. Start going to the gym, clean up your house, or focus more on work to improve your chances at love. Step 3: Commit to going out to bars and social events at least once a week, or make an online dating profile. Step 4: Ask one person out for a casual date. No matter what the answer, brush it off and keep trying.

Start with small changes before tackling larger ones. If you are trying to cut out junk food, it will be incredibly hard to quit eating pizza, soda, cake, candy, and fast-food all at once. Cut things out periodically, which lets you enjoy your early accomplishments and slowly get used to big changes. For example, you might start by eliminating soda from your diet. A week or two later, cut out pizza, then candy, and so on. It can help to make a schedule, as this will keep you in check. If you write down that you are quitting pizza on April 20th, you are much more likely to actually quit than if you just say, “I’ll quit eventually.”

Make up a “mini-quota” for each day. What is the minimum you need to do, each day, to make your change stick? This is separate from the long-term goals or plans because it puts you in a mindset every day to work towards your change. If you want to reform your love life, you might decide to have one extra conversation with a stranger each day, whether on the bus or at work. This allows you to practice your larger goal without stress or fear. Your quota can be low—all it does is set the bar for you. You might decide to do 10 push-ups each day, but nothing keeps you from doing 100 some days as well.

Keep your plans to yourself. This goes against conventional wisdom, which often says that telling someone your goals makes you more likely to pursue them. However, study after study has found that people feel less motivated to work after announcing their plans because they feel slight satisfaction at making them.> The exception to this rule is when working with a group, as working on a goal together frequently makes everyone work harder. Writing down your goals and motivation and keeping them to yourself is a great way to be “public” about your plans to change without sharing anything. One fun, simple exercise to do is to use a platform like Pinterest to collect visual ideas of what you like or where you'd like to be. That way, you'll have a record to look back on.

Simplify your life. Change is often about stripping away the things that are no longer relevant to your life. This allows you to focus on what really matters, putting your energy into things that make you happier and healthy. Take a long look at your life and think about what is non-essential. What activities do you do that make you constantly unhappy? What projects or appointments do you put off for as long as possible? Is there any way to remove these stresses from your life? Think about little things first – cleaning out your email inbox, canceling you’re the newspaper subscription you never read, opening up your schedule, etc. You goal is to make more time in your life to focus on yourself, using your new free time to change for the better.

Be patient and know that change is not easy. Change takes time, and if it didn’t then everyone would be in constant flux. You need to commit to your change for months to make sure it sticks. Know that you will falter, slide back into your own ways, and consider changing your mind. This is only natural, but quitting your reformation at the first sign of trouble will prevent you from ever really changing. In order for your brain to develop strong new neural connections that last throughout your life, you need to work on your change for up to 4-5 months. Keep you goal in mind when things get tough. The amount of time needed to get there is not what is important, the destination is.

Forming Better Habits

Form a group of friends around your new habits. It is much easier to commit to a habit if you have someone willing to work with you. You keep each other accountable, remind each other of goals, and support each other when things get tough. If you cannot find someone to join you, search online for support groups and communities. There are forums and meetings for everyone and every habit: from quitting drugs to working on your artwork once a week. Ask a buddy to quit smoking with you. Pick up an exercise partner to help motivate you at the gym. Commit to sending new chapters, poems, or ideas to a writing buddy once a week. If some people seem skeptical about your transformation, don't feel bad. When you start stepping up your game, people may feel self-conscious that they're not stepping up in their own lives.

Work on your habit every single day. There are some exceptions to this rule, as you do not necessarily want to weight lift without having a rest day here and there. Still, the more frequently you practice your habit they faster it will become an automatic part of your life. Find small ways to practice each day. While you cannot lift weights every day, you could still go to the gym and jog for 20-30 minutes to get some exercise. This works for “bad habits” too, but in reverse. Every day you succumb to your bad habit (smoking, eating junk food, lying) you make it harder to kick. Focus on avoiding temptation one day at a time.

Practice your new activity or habit at the same time every day. Your body is an amazing thing. When you repeat the same activity at the same time and/or place every day, your brain and body begin to anticipate it and prepare for the activity, making it feel natural. This sort of conditioning is invaluable to anyone trying to develop new habits, and can be used anywhere. When building habits, routine is your friend. Schedule the same time to go to the gym each week. Set aside a room or desk to study or do work each evening.

Link your habits into old routines. Instead of saying “I will make my house cleaner,” you could say “every day when I get home, I will clean a room of the house.” This gives your habit a trigger: every time you walk in the door you will remember to do some cleaning. You can do this with bad habits too. If you always smoke outside of the break room at work, avoid going there so you don’t feel tempted to light up a cigarette.

Eliminate obstacles. Quitting smoking is a lot more difficult if you keep a pack of cigarettes in your back pocket. Similarly, eating healthy is a lot easier if you have healthy options with you at lunch. Think about where in your thought process the habit “breaks-down” think about ways to eliminate these hurdles. For example, you might: Get rid of your cigarettes. Pack a healthy lunch the night before work. Exercise after work instead of before so that you are not sweaty at your desk. Bring a pencil and paper with you everywhere to jot down ideas, stories, or art.

Know that there is no “magic number” of days needed to ingrain a habit. Conventional wisdom holds that it takes 21 days to ingrain a habit, but this is not true. Different habits take different people different amounts of time to pick up. Some researchers have found that habits only truly become automatic after 66 days, not 21. This means it is not your fault if you struggle to make something a habit, but it also means that you must find the motivation to make a habit for much longer than 2-3 weeks. Don’t fret if you miss a day or make a mistake – you have 66 more to go, so one day only makes a small difference. Focus on the end goal, not the number of days it takes to reach it.

Changing Your Direction in Life

Draft up a concrete image of what you want to become. Making a major life change, from ending a long-term relationship to switching careers, is usually only terrifying because you don’t know what is coming next. That uncertainty can paralyze you if you don’t take the time to figure out where exactly you are going. You don’t need to know everything, no one ever could, but you do need a vision for how you are going to change. What do you want to eliminate from your life? What do you want to add? Where do you see yourself 1 year after you’ve made your change? What do you want, more than anything else, to spend your time doing?

Plan specific ways to change your lifestyle. Once you have a good idea of where you are going, you need to figure out how to get there. This is often the hardest part of changing, but it becomes much easier if you think of it in reverse. Say your goal is to become a famous author. To make this change a reality, think of the steps that would lead to becoming a famous author until you get to one you can work on: Goal: To Be a Famous Author. Get a book published. Find a literary agent. Write and edit a book. Write every single day. Draft up ideas for books. If you don’t have an idea yet, you would start here. If you do, it’s time to write every day!

Save up. Making a big change in life is a lot easier if you have a safety net to fall back on. You’re more likely to take a plunge when you know that failure doesn’t mean the end of the world, so save up a little extra money. This will allow you to focus on changing your life, not on paying the bills. Open a savings account and start putting in a small percentage (5-10%) of your paycheck in it. Many financial advisors suggest having enough money to cover at least 6 months of living expenses before making a large change, like a move or career change.

Get educated. You never want to make a major lifestyle change without some knowledge of what you are in for. If you want to start a new career, going back to school is often the best way to get on track, as the specific knowledge will prepare you for a life in the field you desire. Even those looking for more “off-beat” changes, like traveling for a year or becoming an artist, need to study to get the most of their lifestyle change. Look up autobiographies of similar people. While you don’t have to follow in their footsteps, they offer valuable advice about what to expect as you change. Spend time researching your new change – what kind of equipment do you need? Do you need to move locations? What are the negatives of your new lifestyle, and do they make you want to change any less?

Get out of your old life quickly and respectfully. Once you’ve made the decision to make a change and you are confident it’s time to start, you need to cut your old ties. This does not mean that you will never see people from your “old life” again. Rather, it means that you need to take some time away from the routines, habits, and lifestyle to truly change things. Never burn bridges with cruel goodbyes or anger. Instead, let people know that you are ready for a change and would love their support as you go through with this.

Work on making your new change a reality every day. You need to commit to your new life fully if you ever expect to change. Sometimes this is easy – if you want to travel for a year you need to get on a plane and get out of the country. But sometimes this requires daily discipline. No matter how you cut it, for example, you need to write every single day if you want to be a famous author. Remember, change is about choice. Make the choices that bring about the change you desire.