7 Tips for making positive change in the New Year

7 Tips for making positive change in the New Year.

Now is the time.

As much as I dislike the cliché of New Year’s resolutions, something about the calendar break point between years enables people to sit down and think about what they can do to make improvements in their lives.  In that sense it’s a good thing and a positive habit if the flipping of the calendar can be the trigger for self improvement thoughts.

Here are 7 tips to help you succeed in your 2014 life change initiatives.

What are we trying to accomplish?

When you sit down and think about New Year’s resolutions what are you really talking about? What is it that you are resolving to do?

It’s change.  Hopefully it is positive change.  The resolution is a set of actions and/or decisions that you intend to take in order to effect change in your lives.

Why do you want to want to change?  Typically it’s because there is some aspect of your life that you are not happy with.  Your health is not what you want it to be.  Your career is stuck.  Your relationships are less than fulfilling.  Maybe there are some negative behaviors that you’d like to remove from your life?

The bottom line is that there is some behavior that is either giving you pain or preventing you from gaining a better life situation.

The next question is ‘Why haven’t you made these changes already?’  There may be some fear or discomfort or effort associated with the new behavior that is a barrier for you to do it (that’s why it takes ‘resolve’ – which is a fancy word for commitment).  Likewise the behavior that you are trying to give up provides some sort of reward or pleasure that makes it hard to give up.

Bottom line is that change is hard and requires taking on new things and giving up old things.

That is the context of your resolution setting exercise.  Keeping this in mind, what are some ways to make it more effective?

Number one:  Choose wisely

There are an infinite number of improvement activities that you can choose from.  I would suggest that most people make some basic mistakes when they make resolutions.

It is a common mistake to make too many resolutions and have too many goals and that causes the power of each individual change initiative to be diluted.

Here is my suggestion: choose one thing you’d like to change from each part of your life, 1. Physical/health, 2. Work/Career, 3. Family/relationship, and 4. Spiritual/self improvement.

For each of these areas of your life brainstorm up a list of possible goals, initiatives, events, aspirations, etc.  Then boil it down to 1 from each category.  Less is more.  Even if it is only one truly transformational goal – that’s great.

Number two: Be specific

One of the reasons resolutions fail is that they are non-specific.  ‘Lose weight’ is non-specific.  ‘Lose 10 pounds by Easter, through exercise and diet by getting a coach to hold me accountable and following their advice’ is a much more specific.

The goal should have a quantity and a date and a series of tasks or events that will get you there.  For example; the above weight loss goal has quantity (10 pounds) and a date (Easter) and the beginning of a task list (find a coach).

If you are really interested in achieving that goal or change you need to specifically think about how you are going to do it.

Number three: Make the goal bigger than the fear

Remember, there is a reason that you haven’t taken these actions yet.  It’s because the reward of the change or the goal doesn’t outweigh the fear of doing it or the pleasure of the negative behavior.  I’m not telling you anything you don’t know already but if you can’t make that goal or change compelling enough to overcome inertia and fear you might as well not even start.

How do you do that?  There are many different tactics.  There are books written on this.  When you go through the exercise above where you chose the 1 – 4 main things you want to affect you should have found something that really compels you.  Pain is a great motivator.  If being fat is painful for you or not being able to climb stairs without being out of breath is painful for you, use that pain, don’t avoid it.

Write out all the pain that you will have if you don’t change.  Write out all the opportunities you’ll miss out on if you don’t make that change.  Read it every day and believe it.  Have it ready because you are going to have to pull it out at the office Christmas party to choose between a donut and your future fitness.  Make the pain of not doing it bigger than the fear of change.

Number four: Lean into the pain

If you want to find those things that will have the greatest impact in your life follow the fear.  What scares the hell out of you?  Quitting your job and starting your own firm?  Talking to your partner about the future?  Or just being the person you see in those future dreams?  Find the fear and lean into it.

Realize that that thing that scares you the most is a short cut.  You will learn more about yourself; you will have greater growth and greater transformation when you find that thing that scares you the most and embrace it.

Yeah.  I can hear the sweat beading up on your forehead.  Change ain’t for sissies.  If you’re serious about it find that nugget that scares the pants of you and start there.  You can save yourself decades of foreplay.

Number five:  Get a coach

I don’t care who you are, how smart you are or how capable you are.  If you could affect positive change in your life in a way that is satisfactory and sufficient we wouldn’t be having this conversation.  Do yourself a favor and get a coach.  Coaches are great at creating good plans and holding you to task.  If you really want to succeed, invest in a coach.

I’m not just talking about a coach to help you with your fitness goals.  You should look at each category of your life that we talked about and get a coach for it.  Not only will a coach help you attain your positive life change but they will help you figure out what that life change should be.

Coaches aren’t just going to tell you what to do.  They are going to provide insights that enable you to do yourself.  The value of a coach is in that catalyst.

What do all successful people have?  Coaches!

Number six: Manage the tradeoffs

All projects succeed or fail on the strength of how you manage the small decisions and tradeoffs.  It’s not the big things that kill goals.  It’s the piling up of little things.

Each day as you strive to affect change in your life you will be confronted by countless small ‘moments of truth’.  It’s how you manage those moments of truth that will make you successful or not in the long run.  Recognize these small moments, have strategies to make the right decisions and choose well when confronted by the tradeoff.

And finally, Number seven: It’s about the journey, stupid.

Many of us get into these silly resolution scenarios because we think there is some future state that if we could only get to it we’d be happy.  This, my friends is known as the ‘destination fallacy’.  There is no perfect state that you are going to achieve.  Change is a matter of making progress, not arriving.

One of the most dramatic changes you can make in your life is to choose to stop being so neurotic about improvement and find a way to be happy with what you have here and now.  Take the opportunities to celebrate progress and little victories.  Enjoy the journey because we all end up in the same place eventually.

Hope this helps.  Enjoy the your solstice celebrations and let me know if you have any strategies that work that you’d like to share.

Chris,