Five Essential Ingredients of Long-Lasting Change

If there’s anything as certain as death and taxes, that would be change. Everything changes. Everyone changes. Constantly. Non-stop.

My favorite thing about living in a 4-season climate is that nature is always sending dramatic reminders of this. (Of course change also occurs in tropical weather, but it’s not as obvious.)

Change is unavoidable, inevitable. A thought from my mother sticks with me to this day: successful people are those who can adapt to their ever-changing circumstances. I have rephrased this to: I’m happy to the degree that I can adapt to and embrace the ever-changing nature of my life.

Sometimes, we don’t want things to change and sometimes we want things to change faster than they do. Sometimes — many times, in fact — we provoke change. There’s a lot to say about the change we resist, but that’s material for other(s) blog post(s). Today I want to focus on the kind of change we want to generate.

No matter what kind of change you’re looking for — establishing a workout routine, healing yourself from an ailment, paying off your credit cards, learning how to cook dark leafy greens, learning what’s enough in your life — certain ingredients are essential if the change is to be meaningful. And hey, if you’re going through the trouble, you may as well do what you can to make it count, right?

Here are 5 essential ingredients of long-lasting change:

1. Become clear about what you want.
The number one obstacle to long-lasting change is lack of clarity. In other words, you know you want to change, but you don’t know how you want the situation to be, or you don’t believe it can happen. Now, it’s important to understand the difference between being clear about the outcome you want and knowing how to get there.

The clarity we’re talking about here is the certainty of the outcome. You don’t need to worry about the step-by-step, nitty-gritty of how it’ll happen. In fact, thinking too much about how you’re going to do something is a great way to stop yourself in your tracks. Just start anywhere and let life do its thing.

Some people call this clarity intention. Whatever you want to call it, it’s simply defining clearly the result you want to get from the change you’re generating.

2. Understand the right motivation.
We often don’t understand our reasons for wanting to change. We just think we must change because then we’ll be “better”, fitter, more attractive, or financially richer, but the truth is, these are not good enough reasons.

Whenever you’re thinking about your reasons to change, ask yourself: am I doing this out of love for myself and others or am I doing it to demonstrate that I can?

The right motivation is always love. If you’re doing something out of greed or fear then your heart will know you won’t get fulfilled and sooner or later, you’re going to sabotage your efforts somehow.

3. You’ve got to dream big.
The idea of accomplishing what you want has to give you butterflies in your belly otherwise it’s just not that interesting and you’re not going to do it.

In a way, this pushes you to explore the right motivation. For example, getting healthy for the sake of being in a healthy body is just not good enough. The things a healthy body will enable you to do is where the juice is. How is this really contributing to you and others? In other words, are you motivated by love?

4. But at the same time, break it down into small steps.
Again, you don’t need to know what those small steps are — they will show up at the right time, but you need to understand that nothing worthy happens overnight. You must develop a sense of process. And you want to know a secret? The process is where the fun is! Learn to appreciate the little tiny changes that usually go unnoticed, otherwise, no change will ever satisfy you.

5. Remember that you can always start again.
Fear of failure is paralyzing and many times we don’t even bother trying because of it. However, what would happen if whenever you “failed” you just picked up again from where you left off without the, “Oh, I failed,” drama? Hear me out: if children didn’t understand they can always start again, none of us would have ever learned to walk.

Mark your calendar!
I hope these thoughts inspire you to continue changing. I want to invite you to a free call I’m doing on June 23th. I’m going to talk about 5 specific strategies I’ve observed in my work that are powerful transformation catalyzers. I’ll give you the details via email, so if you DON’T receive emails from me yet, go ahead and enter your information right there in the upper-right corner of this site.

Now, here’s what I need you to do:
Do you see the comment section down there? Would you share with us: (1) What you think your obstacle for long-lasting change is. (2) What’s one long-lasting change you’ve done? and (3) How did you do it?

Tagged as: lifestyle change, long-lasting change, transformation