Three Thoughts To Help You Achieve The Changes You Want To Make.

With the turning of the year, many of us will feel compelled to set new goals, and to commit to making lasting changes. Those changes can be personal, professional, lifestyle, health or community-related - you name it. Reflect now for a moment. What were the changes you wanted to make this year? Now reflect again, how many of those materialized? Regardless of the number, they had one characteristic in common. Achieving them took hard work, as fundamental and lasting change is hard to make. Period! Neuroscience has shown us that we are wired to prefer a sub-optimal here-and-now, versus taking the risk to achieve a potentially better tomorrow.

The changes you are contemplating making right now can be as ‘simple’ as wanting to lose the ten pounds you have put on over the last year. They can be as hard as making significant life changes, such as leaving 30 years of corporate life behind, taking on a new career path and starting your own company. Yes, those are the two changes I am personally pursuing right now. Fun, exciting, inspirational, but also daunting, hard, uncertain and not all that easy to achieve. How many times have I said that those ten pounds would disappear? How long did the decision to embark upon a new career path really take? Below are some thoughts on how I plan to tackle my personal changes and challenges, and how you might consider applying those thoughts to your own change journey. 

First off, I believe that what happens to you is often outside of your control.

However, how you react to what happens to you is your choice. With that principle, know that what it takes to make the change you want to make rests inside you. You are resourceful. You have what it takes if you are committed to unleashing it. That means it is my resolve that matters here. On a regular basis, I re-examine and test that resolve. The metaphor I have used for years is to open up my chest, look deep inside and ask myself the question – do I have what it takes? Do I have it in my heart, in my gut, and in my soul? If I see it and if I feel it, the likelihood of actually making the lasting change is much higher. If I do not see or feel it, I will focus my energy on things that matter more.

Secondly, whatever the change is you want to make, be realistic and practical in how big the shift really is.

Often we set goals that are moonshots and require the sun, moon, and stars to be aligned. The likelihood of that actually happening is as small as seeing a blue moon. That does not mean we should avoid big hairy audacious goals. It means that we need to be realistic about the energy it will take and how much you can take on at one time. I have learned that the hard way. A suggestion for your consideration: Set challenging but achievable change goals. Pursue them with a disciplined plan and with personal persistence. Stretch yourself but know that small and incremental changes are better than no change at all. Do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good enough. Do not strive for perfection in the initial stages. Enjoy the ‘little changes’ and the forward progress along the way. As success builds over time, your motivation will increase and encourage you to accomplish even more. The impact of those small initial changes and those that you build on top of them will multiply and re-multiply. Remember, Rome was not built in one day.

Lastly, ask yourself, “What is my life’s purpose and how are the changes I want to make supporting it?

Start by asking “What is most important to me in my life right now? What juices me, really juices me?” These questions sound simple, but answering them is not easy. I suggest putting quality time into distilling the elements of your purpose. You should divide the elements into three buckets: 1) the elements you want to keep and build upon, the things that will remain core to whom you want to be, 2) the elements you want to take on, the new areas you really want to explore and pursue, and 3) the elements you will have to let go of, the elements that were once important to you in a previous phase of your life, but are now losing steam or even holding you back. Be intellectually and emotionally ruthless in your assessments and selection of these areas and put them into their respective buckets. Really feel how they contribute to the core essence of your being as you will invest your energy, your focus, and your passion for realizing them. Once you know what your purpose is, write the elements down, make them inspirational and memorable, put strategies and action plans together on how to measure and achieve progress. Perhaps communicate your plan to family, friends, and colleagues, and most importantly, acknowledge that you are accountable for the progress you are making, or not.

To make this practical, let me share my purpose for the next chapter in my life.

At the simplest level, it is “to give back and enable others.” I had the opportunity to learn and assemble a lot of experiences in 30 years of my corporate career. I recently decided to go down a new path, and now I want to use the knowledge I have gathered to help others along their journey. With that, a massive new discovery on many fronts lie ahead for me as I write those first pages in the next chapter in my book of life. I have built a first pass of what I would like my next chapter to become and will refine it as I 'engage and reflect.’ The current headline reads, "My purpose is to give back and to enable people, teams and organizations to be the best they can AND want to be. To put my purpose into action, I have built six distinct strategies to achieve my vision. They include executive mentoring, being part of a faculty to bring on the next generation of executive coaches, starting our own company “The Blue Spark Group,” mentoring MBA students at the Kelly School of Business, exploring for-profit and not-for-profit board work, as well as investing in me and becoming a yoga and meditation certified teacher at the RYT 200 level. And yes, along the way, I plan to work on losing those extra ten pounds. Each of those six purpose areas has a concrete action plan with discrete steps and measurements. These strategies will help me monitor and be accountable to myself and others and will me turn my purpose vision into action. I have communicated this to people that are with me on my journey – just like I do here – and that will increase my accountability to make progress.

As you can see in my personal example, identifying the purpose and putting an action plan together to realize the change builds on the three areas we covered at the beginning of this article.

To summarize, my suggestions to start down your own change path would be:

1) What it takes to make the change you want to make rests in you. You are resourceful. You have what it takes if you are committed to unleashing it. 

2) Be realistic in what you take on. Remember, stretch yourself but know that small and incremental changes are better than no change at all.

3) The more the changes you want to make are aligned with your core values, the higher your motivation will be to realizing them. Ask yourself, “What is my life’s purpose?” Then put strategies and action plans in place to realize that purpose.

I will be dedicating significant effort to ‘giving back to enable others.’ Articles like this are part of my action plan. So are speaking engagements, leadership and organizational development workshops, and coaching and mentoring as part of the Blue Spark Group’s projects (www.thebluesparkgroup.com).

Let us know your thoughts and experiences as you apply or have used some of the suggestions. 

About the author: Robby Swinnen is a former Fortune 50 Senior Executive with 30 years of experience leading global lines of business. He currently dedicates his passion to coaching and mentoring senior executives across a broad range of industries. He is a faculty member at the Hudson Institute of Coaching and is a strategic advisor to boards.