Most people want or desire something, that something becomes a sort of change. Ultimately we want a state change which I covered in my post ‘state’. When it comes to people who want change, they usually want something bigger that requires changing some behavior, creating a habit, improving at an existing skill, or learning an entirely new skill. However, most people don’t achieve the change they set out to. Usually, they fail because they attempt to change too much too soon. Which leads to them ending up in a similar position as the year before. People attempt to change their entire lives in one go. I love and encourage that people want to improve themselves but believe that changing everything in one go doesn’t work. Instead, I’m experimenting with the idea of having a single primary focus of change at a time.
By changing one part of your life you in effect change your entire life. In order to achieve our desired change, we need to understand why changing multiple areas at a time doesn’t work, then how do we decide what to focus on, and finally we need to do it.
Let’s begin with understanding why focusing on changing multiple areas in life at the same time doesn’t work. Have you ever tried to achieve a specific result, like losing weight, starting a business, or gaining strength? Lots of people set New Year’s resolutions but research confirms that few people manage to achieve what they set out to. One of the reasons for the difficulty of achieving the desired change has got to do with people attempting to change too much in one go. As humans we aren’t very good at multitasking, we might want to believe we are but we aren’t. Try to learn two different subjects like coding and dancing at the same time, it’s incredibly difficult. Say our goal is to lose weight, then we need to change our diet, sleep, and exercise routine, and more. If you never exercise and eat poorly and try to change both at the same time it can be incredibly hard to stay consistent past a few weeks. But focusing on only one aspect, diet or exercise, you suddenly make it much easier.
We know that focusing on multiple things is like multitasking and that we humans aren’t good at multitasking, the only option becomes focusing on a single thing. How do we decide what to focus on? First, you need to know what you want to achieve and why you want to achieve it. If we follow the previous example, we want to lose weight. But we need to be more specific, how much weight, 1kg, 5kgs, 20lbs? It’s important that you are specific with the exact result you want to achieve. A good formula is setting SMART-goals (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic-Time-Frame). Once we know what we want to achieve we can break that area down into its principles. A principle for weight loss is that you need to burn more energy than you consume, it can be done by limiting the calories you take in or by burning more than you take in. That’s how you decide whether you want to exercise or change your nutrition first.
Once you have decided on your focus you commit to making sure to focus on that one thing until it’s been internalized and habitualized. To create a habit it takes between 30-66 days of consistency. Stay consistent.
After being consistent your identity would have changed to that of whatever you chose to pursue and you can now begin the next change you want to implement. In a year’s time, you will have changed so much that you probably won’t recognize parts of yourself. I hope this post has been helpful and I invite you to continue reading my blog every week as I will be posting content relating to achieving your full potential and peak performance in any field. If you want to feel awesome and energized I invite you to reach out to me and sign up for coaching by me where I will help you become awesome and feel energized and great by unlocking your full potential.