Changing Your Life: How To Get Started

Changing your life, what does it mean and is it possible? For many people, the thought of changing their lives is overwhelming; for others, it is seemingly impossible, but much like anything in life, you can make changes, and these changes can help you live your best life and turn things around for you. 

It likely won’t be easy or quick, but it’s a journey well worth pursuing if you aren’t happy with how things are going right now.

Identify Your Changes

Changes can be literally anything; it can be a new career, moving to a different area, going traveling, discovering who you are, and becoming a better person literally anything. Identify what changes you want to make, what will make your life better, and what it will take to put them into action. This is your starting point and will give you something to work from.

Set Goals

You need goals to work towards and timelines to follow, or these goals will remain dreams or ideas of things you could do but never actually get around to.

Let’s say you want to lose weight and get fitter for ease. Look at how much weight you want to lose and give yourself an achievable timeline for doing so. Then break this down into smaller goals; for example, if you’re going to lose 100 lbs at around 1-2lbs per week, then this will take anywhere from 12-24 months and will likely seem unachievable. However, setting yourself a goal of losing 10 pounds in 8 weeks is much more realistic and will give you short-term goals to work towards to keep you going. The same goes for improving your fitness. If you want to run a marathon, this won’t happen overnight. Break down your goals into smaller ones and give yourself deadlines to hit these goals before the event itself.

Get Help

When you make changes on your own, it can feel like you are swimming against the tide sometimes. It can be hard to put the discipline in place and keep the motivation going if you feel like you are on this journey alone. Instead, get others involved to help you make progress and cheer you on.

This can be asking family and friends to keep you accountable, or it can be working with professionals to stay on track. It might be that you need to undergo therapy to give you the mental clarity and strength to proceed with your changes, or you might need the help of coaches and experts to provide you with the advice and support you need when things get tough. Or it might be that you can find benefit in joining programs that meet your needs and have the same goals in mind, such as Weightlessness (mind-body) Training. Whatever will help you and give you the support you need, invest in it and support your goals.

Don’t Be Afraid of Failure

No one can be 100% on it all of the time, especially when making massive life changes. It is only natural for your enthusiasm to wane or for you to hit roadblocks and stumble on your journey. And this isn’t something you should be afraid of. Instead, allow yourself to fail, learn from the experience, use it to your advantage, and move forward. It’s not about how many times you fall down, it’s about how you pick yourself up and keep going even if you’re crawling to the finish line or you need to take an extended break. Failure is part of life, and it gives us the tools we need to see where we need to make changes in life and provide valuable experience and learning opportunities.

Track your Progress

While the destination is attractive, the journey is the most beneficial part of changing your life. For this reason, you should be tracking your progress from the very first day. Think of it like someone who is embarking on a weight loss journey would. Taking those first pictures gives them a starting point to compare progress to. From there, taking regular images and tracking changes, losses, habits, and measurements helps them to see how much progress they have made and how their body is changing over time. If you can apply this to the changes you are making, you can remind yourself of how you have come and what you have achieved so far until you get to where you are going.

Changing your life isn’t easy; nothing worth having comes easy. But it will be worth it when you realize your dreams and are living the life you want, whether it takes you one, 5, or 25 years. Stay consistent, keep going, and never lose sight of the end goal.