Change Your Life – Starting Today

If you’ve got everything that you want out of life and want for nothing at all, in any aspect of your life, do not read this article. Everyone else – read on! From my experience in dealing directly with clients for the last fourteen years, or through my online workshop, I reckon everyone else includes almost everyone. Ask yourself these simple questions: Are you 100% happy with yourself? Do you absolutely adore your job? Have you more than enough money? Are you as fit, trim and healthy as you really would love to be? Do you spend lots of time doing the things that you’re really passionate about? I suspect that the “yeses” are few and far between.

Yet, every New Year I see the stream of self-help articles, radio talk shows and websites giving people the encouragement that they undoubtedly need to make a change for a better life. If you were to total up the number of books sold on careers, business success, weight loss, self-help, popular psychology and personal development, I reckon you’d have accounted for the greater part of the non-fiction book market worldwide. People are spending a fortune reading about self-improvement without understanding that self-improvement means you have to improve yourself, yourself!!

So, are you frustrated that your life is stuck in a rut, that you’ve tried to make changes but keep on stumbling or that there are just so many things wrong with your life that you wouldn’t know where to start? Join the gang! Most of us everyone gets stuck, everyone stumbles, everyone gets frustrated from time to time – it’s part of the human condition, you’re not unique and you better stop feeling sorry for yourself, because that only perpetuates your perceived inability to totally change your life. Yes, that inability is a perception, nothing to do with reality.

And you perceived inability is borne out of the fact that, from an early age, you, like the rest of us, have been conditioned to believe that you must somehow accept your lot in life, take your place in society and play by the rules. But the rules have been made by normal people, society is based on a set of norms, you’ve learned your perceived inadequacies from normal people – and seventy years’ psychological research proves that normal people are crazy. You need to step outside the norms, you need to become abnormal because, you know what?, then you’ll be different and isn’t that what changing your life is all about.

So, to change your life you have to break down your normal existence and start living abnormally. No one is going to make a major change in their lives (unless forced to, through crisis, disaster, major health issues or bereavement) by trying to make that big change all at once. If you do, you’ll prove that you were right to think that you couldn’t do it – because it’s just too big a task – and you’ll end up even more frustrated, dejected and convinced that you’re stuck with your lot! To dismantle the edifice of the horribly mundane, not-so-bad, pathetic normal life (in comparison to the abundance that you can truly have) you’ve got to take the edifice down brick-by-brick. Oh my God! I hear you say – that’s a life’s work and I’m desperate to change now. But not all bricks are the same – dislodge the appropriate bricks and the whole edifice will collapse, just like those skyscrapers that you see being demolished by controlled explosion.

The biggest demolition job will be achieved by taking out some of the tiniest bricks – the little habits that all of us have that, when combined, maintain your mental numbness and disable your innate ability to create the life that you truly want. Yeah – the research is clear, we live out our days automatically, mindlessly, unable to devote our energy to creating the life we really want. This “automaticity” is maintained by your habitual behaviour. I’m not talking about breaking bad habits – some of those are as big an issue for people as trying to reinvent their whole life! I’m talking about undoing the fabric of your daily life by doing small things, that you always do in a routinely habitual way, differently.

The psychology behind this is breathlessly simple. If, for example, in getting up this morning I decide to brush my teeth with the hand that I don’t habitually use, I’ve taken a major psychological leap – I have made a conscious choice in place of a subconscious automatic reaction. In doing so, I have just realized that, in every single thing that I do, I have a choice. But there’s more, in then brushing my teeth differently, more of my attention is required to complete the task. This is another psychological leap because research shows that our lives are mundane because we only pay 1% attention to what we’re doing. Now, I’m suddenly paying more than 1%. Believe it or not, this is life-changing. Don’t take my word for it, so many people who are either clients, readers or have just heard me speak for ten minutes call and email telling me it’s “changed my life forever”. Don’t even take their word for it – try it yourself. There are hundreds of things that you do everyday automatically and mindlessly – including not doing the things that you really want to do with your life. Starting small pulls the keystones out from under your not-too-bad life and sets you off on a journey of discovery – life’s great adventure.