Small Changes: How You Can Use Them to Create a Life You Love

I recently started at my new job, and well, for the lack of a better word, things aren’t where they should be, granted the amount of time these guys are in the business for. And so I was really scratching my head as to why, and how things move so slowly here, until I went into a meeting, discussing a project with a colleague. When I asked him how long he thought it would take, his response floored me: 3 months.

Just for the record, I was able to deliver it in 2 weeks.

This experience reminded me how often we let the fear of the unknown and the tendency to overcomplicate things hold us back. We create barriers in our minds that make challenges seem insurmountable. And what’s sad here is that this failure approach isn’t just limited to our jobs, but it’s also there in our personal lives.

Your memories are your life

You know, as humans, we often get this itch to completely reinvent ourselves overnight. It’s hard not to feel that way, especially with all the self-help gurus out there and those viral social media challenges like the 75 Hard making it seem so easy. However, what we often overlook is the memories that we will collect along the way.

Since, your memory, is like a database storage where you archive the moments of reinforcing self-trust, or self-distrust. And majority of us, are busy doing the latter, for most of our lives.

This is what it looks like:

Make a big promise to yourself > underdeliver > start eating yourself away mentally because you “failed” > spin your wheels because your initial plan hasn’t worked out > waste a lot of time to the point you feel like you now need to “catch-up” on all the progress that you have missed out on > make a big promise to yourself again, because you need to do “something big”.

Sounds familiar? Guess how I know.

The way out

So problem is, whenever I say this to people, they usually fall into 2 camps:

“Well yeah, you know maybe that holds some truth, but I have to fix stuff in life now, and maybe I will come back to this thing whenever I actually need some structure”.

OR

“yeah that’s true, but literally nothing worked for me, so I doubt there will be something you will tell me that would work”.

Eitherway, the answer is always the same, you gotta build the self-trust, because I can guarantee you, whatever it is that you are tackling right now, can and will benefit from this approach. And the easiest way to build something, is to always aim low enough, start small, have a plan on how to progress, and execute.

Putting it into Practice

LOOK.

I am pragmatic, so let’s put this into practice, say for example you would like to start waking up at 5AM or whatever, and you currently go to bed at 11pm and you wake up around 7am, cool.

So something you could do, is make a roadmap for yourself.

Start by going to bed and waking up earlier by just 20 minutes, do it for a week, make another reduction, do it for a week and so on.

And you can see how just in a matter of couple of weeks, something that seemed to be so far out of reach, is actually very much possible.

It seems long. It seems boring. But it guarantees 3 things:

1. You achieving your goal without major setbacks – which is actually the fastest way to go about things.
2. You having a rollback plan in case you slip up (you know that you can always go back to waking up just 20 minutes earlier and follow through).
3. And the main one: you are collecting positive experiences which would then ripple throughout your entire life.

And that last point is literally worth more than any ego boost you can get from going all-in. Because now instead of waking up and living with a loser reflection, you wake up, and you are collecting wins and building trust with yourself. And those wins re-assure you, that you can actually do what you plan on doing, rather than simply carrying this huge bag of failures and always doubting yourself.

This principle can—and should—be applied to anything and everything you work on in life. Self-trust, is like a muscle, once you’ve trained it, it will be reinforced naturally, by you sticking with it (You just gotta tug your ego away).