The secret to changing your life

Do you want to change something in your life, in your work, in your relationships; your health, weight, happiness, job, confidence...?

Here's the secret.

You can change your life only to the extent that you can tolerate a little discomfort.

That's all. And it is that simple.

As soon as we start to try and change something, we feel uncomfortable because it is different.

How will you ever change if you can't tolerate a little discomfort?

Your motivation to change needs to be sufficient to overcome your competing motivation to avoid discomfort.

Therefore, you can do two things:

1. Increase your motivation to change 2. Decrease the discomfort of change

Think of a change you want to make.

Each and every day, how are you going to approach that change differently now?

Here are some tips on how to deal with the discomfort of change.

The sadness of dead daffodils

It is spring, and the daffodils are coming up. In a park near here, the lawnmower cut down a bed of these budding daffodils. What a shame. Perhaps the lawnmower driver did not see them.

If a plant sends its first tentative leaves above the ground, it is worth waiting to see what kind of plant it is before sending in the lawnmower.

If a new idea blinks its way into the light, it is worth waiting to see what kind of an idea it is before destroying it.

Too many times, we destroy new ideas in their infancy before we see what they can become.

The next time you or a colleague has an idea, give it a chance to grow. Think of it as incubation (and protection from the lawnmower). The green shoot can become a daffodil, the ugly duckling becomes a swan, and an idea can grow to change everything.

Walt Disney used to organise his creative teams so that new ideas had a chance to flourish, and you can also use his simple process. It is method 3 at the bottom of this page.

Are you listening to the siren call from the past?

It is often in the times that we think of as hard, tough and difficult that we make the biggest changes and develop the most momentum.

When everything feels good enough, it’s easy to do nothing to change, even if things could be better.

A semi-comfortable normal is the enemy of change and growth.

I sometimes describe this as a fur-lined rut.

A rut of seductive comfort seducing us to stay, but limiting, nonetheless.

As the pandemic continues, so many are talking about, and even yearning to return to ‘normal’. This is the siren call of the fur-lined rut from which they were so rudely yanked by the disruption.

Instead, focus on what you have learned or gained from the disruption.

Focus on what society has learned or gained from the disruption.

Focus on your best guess as to how things will pan out rather than heed the siren call for what used to be in the ‘good old days’.

Are you listening to the siren call from the past, or are you moving forward?

Knowing about stuff is overrated

We are encouraged to learn. Fair enough.

Why?

To improve our lives and the lives of those around us. (That’s the best reason I could come up with)

Does it work?

Only if you do something with what you have learned. It seems to me that we need to change something, no matter how subtle, to achieve any improvement.

The problem is that knowing something does not mean that the ‘doing’ changes.

The issue is the knowing/doing gap.

Learning then doing is far more important than learning then knowing ?

We all have things that we know which ‘should’ change our behaviour, but our behaviour does not change in line with what we know.

What about you?