How to change your life
How often have you tried to change something, only to give up a few weeks later?
I know my list of failed changes is pretty long. I often have great intentions (about getting up earlier, or eating more healthily, or taking more exercise) – but I don’t always manage to follow through.
If it’s the same for you, perhaps you’re lacking one crucial component of change: other people.
How often do you change your mind?
There are some little things which you might flip-flop on every day. Perhaps you decide you want tacos for dinner, but when evening rolls around, you’re hankering for a pizza instead. Or you switch your usual latte for a cappuccino. Or you change your workout at the gym.
But when it comes to big issues – like your career plans, your beliefs and values, your hopes and aspirations – you probably change your mind rarely, if ever.
Have you ever started off on some huge project to overhaul your entire life – only to give up after a couple of weeks?
Change doesn’t need to be dramatic or all-encompassing. Small, individual changes can lead to new habits, and – eventually – to a much-improved life. They might seem insignificant on their own, but they build up to a powerful force, just like raindrops working away at rocks.
Here are 30 tiny changes that you can start on today. If you made just one change every day, you’d be doing them all in a month’s time. How different could your life look in a year?
Pop quiz. Which of these do you agree with? 1) Intelligence is fixed at birth. 2)Some people are creative, others aren’t. 3) You can become a world-class expert through enough practice, whatever your starting point. 4) You can change your personality.
If you agreed with the first two statements, you’re coming from a fixed mindset. If you agreed with the second two, you’ve got a growth mindset.
One of my biggest hopes in life is that I will make a difference. I’d like this world to be a little better because I was in it.
However, “change the world” isn’t an easy item to put on a to-do list. Where do you even begin?
Here are eight great ways to change the world for a better. They’re all fairly quick – all things you could do today. Which will you pick?
Success. That word means different things to different people – but I imagine that when you read it, you think about how it would feel to achieve your goals, to enjoy yourself, and to be proud of the life you are living.
I believe that success is relatively simple. That doesn’t mean that it’s easy – but it does mean that it’s achievable. For all of us.
If you try out a new recipe, you’ll want some idea of what you’re expecting at the end. Cookbooks usually have photographs, so you can see how the finished dish should look. Even if there’s no photo, there’s at least a title for the recipe. The lists of ingredients might look similar at a glance, but from the title and photo, you know whether you’re baking muffins verses bread, or making a stew verses a curry.
Are you overweight? If your life never quite satisfies you – if you don’t feel you’re as confident, productive, motivated or enthused as you could be, try kick-starting the changes you want to make by beginning with your body.
Seven years ago, I was shy, chubby, lacking in confidence, and struggling to think beyond my immediate future: going to Cambridge University. I’d been fatter than my classmates since the age of nine or ten. Finally losing that extra thirty or so pounds I’d been carrying around has had a tremendous impact on my life over the past seven years.
