Once upon a time in the year 2022, a young man was sitting at his desk. It was past midnight and he was on his laptop. He had done a lot of soul searching that evening and had realized that he was far away from where he wanted to be in life. He had lofty goals and aspirations in many areas. But they seemed like a distant dream and he had no idea how to start moving in the direction of realizing his aspirations and achieving his goals. He decided to turn to the one person who he knew could provide answers to pretty much everything in those times.
GOOGLE!
He went on it, typed in the following words and hit the search button:
"How to be successful at …… ?"
He found tons and tons of articles and videos. In summary, all of them seemed to say something along these lines:
“You have to make a decision, a big commitment; you have to decide that you really want it. Then you need to work hard, push yourself, feel the pain, keep going and be relentless. You have to make huge sacrifices, need to be constantly motivated, and on the other side of it, you will meet success!”
Does this sound familiar?
If you look around on the Internet and in most books which are published as part of the motivational or personal development sphere, these above mentioned themes are writ large on all of them. There are thousands of books, videos and E-books etc. that regurgitate these themes over and over again with slight variations. The same goes for the fitness sphere. If anyone who is looking to get in better shape, lose weight or build muscle looks for resources, they are inundated with several fancy complicated diets, 30-day challenges and new exercise routines that are all built around the themes of wanting it badly, having unwavering determination and motivation, going through a massive burst of effort involving a heroic struggle and coming out on the other side of it to reach success.
When distilled down to the very core, all of these are based on the following underlying mindsets:
Success and achieving change requires:
· Making a huge life changing decision.
· Massive motivation.
· Extreme determination.
· Intense effort.
· Facing a heroic struggle.
· Coming out victorious.
All of this is also supposed to take place within a relatively short period of time such as 30, 60 or 90 days.
I like to classify this as the “Feel the burn mentality” which is very common in the fitness sphere.
I feel that in present times, the majority of the sources around us tell us that achieving success or making a change in one’s life is something that can only be achieved in a DRAMATIC WAY! You need to feel the burn and keep going and then by sheer willpower and grit, you will be able to achieve your goal. While this is perfectly suited for a short motivational video or speech on YouTube or makes for a catchy book title, I highly doubt its effectiveness in helping people make any real changes in their life.
We are all intent on achieving success and making positive changes in our lives, but before we get around to planning how to do that, let’s take a moment to consider how negative change and failure usually play out in real life. Say one day we wake up, look at ourselves in the mirror and realize that we have put on a ton of weight or we take a look at our bank account and see that our finances are in a very bad shape. Now how did we get there? Did we make a decision one day that we are going to put on a ton of weight and then work really hard and within 90 days manage to get to our goal? Did we decide that we will be reckless with our money and then went about ensuring that we put in effort to spend a lot of money?
Probably not. Then how did we end up in this situation? If we look back, we realize that we ended up in this situation due to small bad decisions that we took over a long period of time. One of the reasons we took those bad decisions is that each individual small decision or choice did not seem very harmful or significant at the time we were making them but over the course of a year or two or five they have ensured that we landed in this unfavourable situation.
The funny part is, most of the time if we think about it, none of those choices taken individually would have a really bad impact on us. When we took the decision to eat the pie instead of a fruit, that one time eating the pie by itself will not have really harmed us. Similarly that one time deciding to splurge on a new phone or a watch instead of saving some money would not really have too much of an impact but over the course of time those small decisions compound to land us in a soup.
Now that we see that negative changes happen in our life in this slow, incremental manner over a long period of time, why not adopt the same model of change to the positive things we want to bring about in our life?
But no, we don’t even consider that when it comes to positive changes. Instead, it’s go big or go home! Big resolutions, grand plans, monumental declarations of how we are going to commit and reach our goal with a big burst of effort. It’s the feel the burn and push yourself mentality and it rarely works. Simply because our brain always resists change, and when we force that amount of change on it, it rebels, we are not able to sustain it and before we know it, we are back where we started.
On the other hand, we can try a different strategy. A strategy that is proven to work because we have all experienced it or seen it happen to others when it comes to negative changes. We can learn from that and employ the same strategy to bring about favourable changes that we desire.
So how would that strategy look?
It would involve small positive actions or choices that seem insignificant at the time when we do them just like how the bad choices seemed inconsequential. They are going to feel like they don’t really matter and individually they probably won’t. However, just like with the bad choices, we are going to keep making the small good choices every day or repeatedly and they compound over a long period of time. So let’s see how this might play out in the case of getting in shape.
If we follow this strategy then instead of making a dramatic decision of deciding to work out 1 hour a day or 3 times a week, we make small changes like doing 5 push-ups every day or going for a walk around the block or something similar which is extremely tiny and seems insignificant. The reason that we choose such a small action is because, we can do it consistently every day regardless of how busy we are or the amount of energy or motivation we have. Of course, we do not have to restrict ourselves to the small action and can do much more on the days we feel like it, but the commitment is to ensure that we do that small action every day without fail.
With time those small actions become routine and compound and we might start going to the gym once a week and then two times and slowly increase the intensity of the activity but only after the easy small actions are firmly formed into habits. Following this method will definitely not bring us any tangible changes or improvements in 30, 60 or 90 days but over the course of 200-300 days or more they snowball into powerful habits that we can then sustain for years to come.
Soon, one day we wake up and realize that we are no longer overweight and look quite fit and healthy and maybe even see some muscle definition and when we look back we realize, that just like the negative outcome, this positive outcome came about slowly and even without us realizing it due to the sum of small positive choices that we made over the course of a long period.
This strategy of achieving change slowly with small, imperceptible steps and actions is something that I have applied to ingrain quite a few habits that had eluded me for years. After several attempts at achieving quick and drastic changes through 30 day challenges and failing, I have found that this method can work extremely effectively. If you have had your fair share of short-term challenges and diets etc. where you have tried to bring about drastic changes without much success, I highly recommend giving this strategy a go. It is not flashy, it is not inspirational, it does not sound heroic in the short- term but it can be devastatingly effective in bringing about long-term change.
Until next time...
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