Are You Really Ready To Make A Change?
You’ve decided it’s time to make a healthy lifestyle change.
You’re tired of feeling sluggish and stressed. Maybe you've been told by your doctor that you’re at risk for serious health problems, or you're lacking confidence in your body. You decide you're going to do something about it.
That’s great. But will you actually do something? Many people don’t. They think about it. They talk about it: “I really should get to the gym." "I need to stop drinking soda.”
But the days and weeks pass and that desire doesn’t turn into action, or they take some steps but don’t go all the way. Why?
When it comes to behavior, there’s friction to changing and a strong pull to stay the same. As Newton’s first law of motion says: “a body at rest stays at rest and a body in motion stays in motion.”
It’s much easier to keep doing what we’re already doing than it is to change, especially when that change involves something as difficult as healthy eating or sticking to physical activity.
To make things even more difficult, there’s a difference between a change that’s successful and sticks, and one that doesn’t.
To learn more about why your brain makes it hard for you to change your behaviors and how you can set yourself up for success, check out my article on Why Is Change So Hard?
You don’t want to start a healthy diet or exercise program only to give it up a few weeks later, right? You want to change in a way that helps you build lasting healthy habits and yields permanent results.
What Does It Really Take To Make A Successful Change?
The effort it takes to get started on any change attempt is pretty big, but a successful, long-term change takes a different kind of work and commitment than you might think.
It takes preparation that needs to be done as soon as you commit to a change: “right now” work.
If you’ve tried to change before, you probably thought you were committed to your goals. Maybe you were, but you were probably committing to “future” effort, not “right now” effort.
It’s easy to commit to making a change when the actual work happens sometime in the future. You can say “I’m going to start working out”, but your first workout isn’t right now - it’s next week, once you’ve signed up at the gym and bought some new sneakers.
You’re depending on your future self to follow through on the commitment you make in the present, and that leaves too much up to chance.
A successful change starts with immediate action. To make a change that sticks, there is a lot of preparation to do. You need to:
Set specific, detailed and written goals.
Have the patience and confidence to start with a really, really small change and build from there.
Write down a detailed plan of exactly what you need to do each day to achieve your specified goal.
Change your environment to make it as easy as possible to follow through and as hard as possible to fail.
Set up tracking, support, and reward systems.
Acknowledge that the process is going to be difficult, and that there’s a lot of work that will need to be done.
Accept that you are going down a long road and that you will probably falter many times, and resolve to keep trying when that happens.
That seems like a lot, and it is. Because change is so difficult, this is what it takes to set yourself up to be successful.
You might think you don’t really need to do all of this, that if you make a heartfelt commitment now you’ll have the willpower to follow through later.
I can assure you, though, that if you go into a change attempt without a plan, you’ll end up disappointed and it’ll be even harder to try again next time.
This is also just the beginning. There is future work that will need to be done, and a lot of it.
You will need to show up at the gym or do your home workouts. You will need to learn new skills, and set aside time to go to the grocery store and prep and cook your meals. You will need to change some of your old habits and make hard choices.
The preparation you do up-front will make it much more likely that you actually complete that future work, but it’s still not going to be easy.
What If You’re Not Ready Yet?
It’s self-assessment time. Now that you understand the effort it will take, both immediately and in the future, to achieve your goal, it’s time to make a decision. Are you really ready to take your change seriously and do what needs to be done?
If not, that’s ok. It doesn’t mean you’re lazy, or that you’re not capable of change. It just means that the pain of staying the same or the reward you would get from changing isn’t strong enough to push you to action yet. That doesn’t have to be the case forever.
For some people, a big event in their life, like the birth of a child or a medical diagnosis serves as a wake-up call that prompts them to get serious about making a change.
Once something like that happens, the push to change becomes greater than the pull to stay the same, and they're ready to get started.
You don’t have to wait for a life-changing event to spur on a change, though. Making the benefits meaningful enough to you might tip the scale towards action.
Learn about the many benefits of being active and healthy eating (there are more than you might think) and try to connect those benefits to your day-to-day life in a way that makes them real and immediate enough to motivate you.
You could also shrink the change. It takes a lot more effort (and requires a much greater push to get started) to follow a grueling, 5-day a week workout program than it does to do go for a 10 minute walk after work each evening.
Start with a small, achievable change to reduce the friction to getting started, and slowly increase from there.
If You Are Ready, The Time Is Now!
If, with a clear understanding of the work that’s ahead of you, you do feel ready, then it’s time to get going! Grab a piece of paper right now and start making your plans.
If you need help organizing your goals and plans, download my FREE Goal-Setting Guide.
This guide walks you step-by-step through the process of setting effective and achievable goals and creating plans that will help you be successful.
You’ve got this!
