Changing and Improving to Achieve Your Goals

To Achieve New or Higher Goals, Change Is Necessary!

The feel for the need to change for many of us comes after we are “stung” by an undesired outcome.? Despite the pain, this is a good thing as change delivers many benefits such as:

• Progress: without change, there is no progress. Things stay the same and ultimately stagnate and die.?
• Personal Growth: it brings us new experiences.? We discover new insights and awareness, even from failed efforts.
• Flexibility and Adaptability: experiencing change helps us to become more flexible and adaptable.? We learn how to handle some chaos, which provides us with more confidence for future unknown situations.?
• Values: change can help us to re-evaluate our lives by seeing things from a different perspective.
• Strength: going through a transition builds strength.?
• Opportunities: it brings new opportunities for personal growth, business success and fulfillment.
• Excitement: change brings excitement and challenge.? Without it, everything is routine.?

Unfortunately, some never make the commitment to change and become stuck in a cycle of frustration wondering why things do not improve.? Life is ever changing and we need to be as well.??

“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always be where you’ve always been.” —T.D. Jakes

In pursuing new or loftier goals, we need to understand, be comfortable with and embrace change or new achievement will not be possible.

It is not Just About Setting Goals, It Is Also About Creating Supporting Behaviors

When we set goals, we also need to target behaviors, which will in turn will lead to our goals.? Your goals might include losing 20 pounds, being more productive at work, etc.? All of these might be good (as long as they are SMART goals ), but each of them involves a number of behaviors, which can lead to opportunities for failure.? In order to maximize the opportunity of success, we need to add behavioral changes that will develop into habits that will help us achieve our targets. For example:

• With a goal of increasing leadership knowledge, we could add a supporting goal of reading 10 books on leadership.? Then we could add in the daily behavior of reading at least 30 minutes the same time every day.
• With a goal of being more productive at work, we could have a supporting goal of getting to work early every day for a faster start.? We could then add in behaviors like:
• packing lunch and laying out clothes the night before
• getting out of bed at the first alarm and refraining from hitting the snooze
• we could also add moving the alarm clock out of reach from the bed so we have to get up to turn it off

The idea is to develop detailed supporting goals and then create small and simple behavior changes that will lead to habit creation that will lead to achieving the large goal.

“You’ll never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.” John C. Maxwell

Having goals is a fantastic start. However, the combination of large goals with supporting detailed goals and simple behaviors that become daily habits is much more powerful.? When we target routine behaviors and practice them regularly, they will eventually become habits, and this is where the power is because we practice habits effortlessly without thought.?

The Challenge

Change is hard.? We all should know this because each of us has at least one bad habit that we have tried to stop like smoking, over-eating, over-spending, etc.? Even when faced with life or death situations, change is difficult according to Dr. Donald Edmonson, Director of the Center for Behavioral Cardiovascular Health at Columbia University Irving Medical Center.? Consider the following:

• Studies show that only 20 per cent of people are able to maintain their weight loss after 1 year.
• Research shows that 30% of those who make New Year’s Resolutions give up on them by the end of 2 weeks, and according to a study conducted by British Psychologist, Richard Wiseman, only 12% ultimately achieve their goal.

While change is hard, we need to pursue it if we want to improve our lives.??

Growth is painful. Change is painful. But, nothing is as painful as staying stuck where you do not belong. - N. R. Narayana Murthy

The very good news is that science has learned quite a bit about personal behavior and change, and today we have a better understanding of what we can do to improve our chances of success.

The Formula for Success

While many of us stink at change, it is doable!? Let us look at what we can do to improve the likelihood that we will succeed in making our changes.

Develop Your Uncomfortable State – the Impetus for Change

According to Steve Olsher, New York Times best-selling author, “Before anything can change in your life, you have to shed light on it. There has to be a moment when you take a hard look at the truth and contend with the fact it is no longer acceptable. You must be uncomfortable to make a change.”??

One of the reasons we do not create positive change in our life is that we do not have a big enough drive and desire to do it.? Before you do anything else, feel the pain of the way things are right now on a level that makes you uncomfortable.? Really make yourself look at what is at stake, what would be if you changed.? Imagine every aspect of the pain in not realizing the future.? Focus on the loss of what “could be” from your inaction.?

According to the authors of the best-seller Change Anything: The New Science of Personal Success, humans are much more motivated to avoid loss than to obtain gain.? Envisioning a life plagued with lost abilities due to heart disease or an early death is much more powerful for creating healthy habits than imagining yourself looking sleek and trim.? The authors conducted a study and found that Apple customers were 12 times more motivated by the fear of losing their new smartphones than in obtaining new ones.

Once you have felt the pain and realize powerfully why you need to change, then look at the positives.? After your change, what will your future look like? What is at stake?? One of your goals may be to increase your income by 20%.? Now go a little deeper and ask yourself, “What will you do with the money?”? It could be very important to your children’s future as it might allow you to send them to a better school.? This is not the time to work out the how, where, or what.? You should focus on your feelings.? If you can really feel and make a connection with the emotions, it will help you commit to the change and to stay on track.

Tie the Change to Core Beliefs, Values and Purposes

Sometimes our commitments to change fail because they are not rooted in our deeply held values, interests, and beliefs.? According to Jeff Zwiefel, COO Life Time “Commitment is the real driver and motivator behind lasting change.”?? In order to foster a deep commitment, a goal and behavior change needs to have importance and value.

According to Daryl Gioffre, author of Get Off Your Acid: 7 Steps in 7 Days to Lose Weight, “When the challenging times come up, you have a purpose wrapped around your goals so strong that you will find a way to obtain the goals, as opposed to abandoning them like so many do.”

I am going to share a personal experience to illustrate this.? Six years ago, I set out on a journey to lose 50+ pounds (there is no kind way to say it - I was obese).? My goal was to weigh less than I did when I graduated high school.? I was having some health issues (the undesired outcome/pain) that spurred me on.? One of the first things I did was to look at the reasons I needed to pursue the weight loss – “What will be lost if I don’t lose this weight and what would be gained if I do?”

Some of the reasons I came up with were that I would:

• Feel better
• Have more energy
• Hopefully be able to avoid taking medications
• Have a better chance to live longer and be more active to:

1.????? Have more time (more years) with my wife and children

2.????? Have an opportunity to potentially experience grandchildren?

3.????? Be able to be really active later during my retirement years

I was worried about losing productive years from my life.? I came to see the effort as re-setting my personal behaviors and habits for the final “push” in my life.? With all of this in my thoughts, the effort became a much deeper commitment than simply losing weight.? I was battling for my loved ones and my life.? I went on to lose a little over 51 pounds in 5 months and was able to keep it off now for more than 6 years with a few bumps in the road. Today I still weigh less than when I graduated high school. ?This journey hasn't been easy, but it has been easier to stay the course since I got in touch with the painful drivers and realized what I was really risking, and reminded myself of this every day

The deeper engagement and purpose really helped me as it drove a very serious level of dedication.? There was no option of quitting or giving up because of what was on the line.?

The Rest of the Formula

• Be truthful with yourself.? Seek out objective input.? Ask for honest feedback from the people closest to you and be ready to listen to it.?
• Start small. Whatever it is you want to achieve, break it down into small, bite-sized actions. The key to success in change is to string together enough of the right decisions routinely.? You do not start a running program by trying to run 5 miles the first day. You start by getting outside and running for 5 minutes. After a few days, you increase the time ultimately building up to the optimum level over a number of weeks.
• Select one behavior at a time. Change is challenging and working on more than one behavior at a time can be extremely stressful.? Work on one behavior at a time and after it becomes habit, move onto the next.
• Have a cue or trigger. Use an already established habit or activity as the trigger to remind you to do the new behavior. For instance, if you want to meditate do it immediately after taking a shower.? By attaching new behaviors to existing habits, you make it easier for your brain to integrate the new behavior and make it more habit forming.
• Gamify it - Reward yourself.? Find some small way to acknowledge your efforts, or have another person (your spouse for example) do it.? Find out what feels like a reward, and give it to yourself immediately following your new habit.
• Create accountability. If someone else knows about your effort and is paying attention, you are more likely to follow through.? Share the plans of your new goal and habit(s) with other people.
• Find a support network. Studies show that people we spend time with affect our habits, both good and dad. Researchers found that a peer support group inspired people to achieve more savings while another study from Harvard found that those who have at least one obese friend have a 57% greater likelihood of being obese themselves.
• Prepare for some short-term setbacks.? None of us is perfect and life has a way of getting in the way of our plans. If you miss a day for your habit, do not use this as an excuse to give up.? According to experts, this is one of the biggest reasons people fail with their New Year’s Resolutions. If you have a setback, pick back up as soon as possible.? Use it as an impetus for a new goal: “I went 14 days in a row, now my next goal is to make it 30 days.”? Short-term setbacks only become real failure if you let them.
• Be patient and stay the course.? Depending on the difficulty of the positive change, it could take a while for it to become a habit.? The study How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world (2009 – University College London) showed that the average time for individuals to form new habits was 66 days.? Do not get impatient after the first few weeks.? Be consistent and resolute in completing your small daily actions.
• Write it all down.? Written goals are more powerful than thought-about goals.? Develop a plan and write everything down - large goals, supporting goals, behaviors, benefits, feelings, rewards, etc.? Writing down your plans forces you to be specific and make a commitment.? According to studies, people who vividly describe their goals are from 1.2 to 1.4 times more likely to accomplish their goals.? Once you have your plans written down, review them regularly.?

Personal and professional development is a $44 billion dollar industry.? This is probably because while we may know what we want to make happen, we usually fail to seriously plan, look for easy solutions or for something that will help make it happen quickly, or give up at the first bump in the road.? Anything we truly want in life that is worthwhile takes effort, a change in thought and behavior, time and perseverance? Adhering to these principles should help us to achieve the results we want.

“You are essentially who you create yourself to be, and all that occurs in your life is the result of your own making.” ― Stephen Richards