Now, once we’ve decided to change, and we’ve accepted it’s possible and are ready to change ourselves, change our lives, then really one of the big questions is how.
What exactly is going to change? And that’s where we can look at our values, what we care about, what is important to us.
Because any change that we make, it makes sense to move and change ourselves towards our values, to bring our life closer to those values, to what we believe is good.
And that comes from looking within ourselves, and also means breaking away from maybe what other people think.
Because while we may agree with them in many cases, people can agree about a lot of the things that are good, but people also have a lot of opinions about how we should live, and that can get in the way of what we really value.
Everybody has an opinion.
And so we can choose to listen in some cases, but also listen to ourselves and what we choose, what we think is right.
So if we purely listen to others, they can pull us in all different directions.
And furthermore, we only need to change areas where we think it will actually improve.
We don’t need to change everything.
We don’t need to become sort of these like super-characters.
We don’t need to be anywhere near perfect.
And it’s just we can look at what are the problems? What are the aspects of ourselves that are giving us problems? And that’s what can change.
So that we don’t have to change anything.
We can focus on those things that are getting in the way of living in alignment with our values.
So starting with those specific things.
And with specific areas, we can start by making very tiny steps.
We can start to make very small changes.
And this is, I find, one of the most helpful things, is to start with extremely small things.
Even if they’re laughably small things, like doing meditation for 10 seconds, or doing one push-up, and so on.
I love the power of making these really, really tiny changes, because it just seems like there’s just so little barrier to doing them.
It seems like when we want to do something big, we want something big, often it’s like climbing a wall just to get started.
But this is just like taking the tiniest of baby steps.
And another thing is, as we make changes, often we get no results, and that is one of the things that’s a bit of a challenge, takes some patience and adjustment of mindset, to be willing to do things that we have a trust and a faith that it will lead to good things, even though we don’t see results.
Like exercising and doing good, changing our habits to improve: for a long time, it can just feel uncomfortable, and it can just not seem to give any benefits, but then one day we wake up and we feel stronger and healthier.
And it comes later.
So we get these gains in jumps spaced out, whereas the effort goes in every day, and then we only at certain times reap the rewards.
And another way of looking at the way to shape our life is, rather than having to make everything good versus bad and decide what’s good, what’s bad, simply decide what’s important, and the rest is irrelevant.
And that’s another way of looking at our values and how to prioritize our life.
Finally, we don’t entirely need to have clear goals.
Sometimes, I mean, there can be many great advantages to having clear goals, but I think we have this kind of vague vision that kind of moves us in a certain direction.
We don’t need to have clear absolute goals that we’re trying to reach.
We just have to have something to help us move in a certain direction.
And finally, I like the idea of instead of chasing happiness, instead of trying to have a happy life directly, we try to do good things, we try to do things that are aligned with our values, that feel good, that feel right.
We do the things that we feel are good, and that tends to lead to happiness.
It makes happiness more likely.
So rather than pursuing happiness directly, it’s like we become a happiness generator with our actions.
And I think that’s ultimately the reward of living a better life, of improving the way we live, is that even though a lot of the things we’re doing are kind of uncomfortable and don’t make us happy, it just leads to a greater chance of happiness emerging.
And so that’s how I have gotten started with self-development.
And I would be happy to hear from you, what you think of this program, and is there anything missing that could be helpful to get started in this?
#startthechange #getstarted #lifecanchange