8. 3 Steps to Begin to Change Your Life

Do you ever think, "I really want to create more happiness in my life, but I feel stuck. I just can't get going. I want things to be different, but I have no idea where to begin. I want positive change, but I feel like I'm in a rut. What should I do?" 

Listen to hear Melissa's three steps to begin to change your life. 

Lani: Caregiving Philosophy
Melissa: Wandering Missy - Start Living the Life You Want. How to find Joy + Purpose in your Life.

Transcript

3 Steps to Begin to Change Your Life

KEYWORDS goal, thoughts, change, create, smart goals, happiness, feel, life, feelings, date, deadline, outcome, people, achieve, afraid, steps, ruminating, starting 

SPEAKERS Melissa, Lani 

Melissa 00:09 I was speaking to someone the other day, a client, who was asking a question about changing your life. The exact question was, "I really want to create more happiness in my life, but I feel stuck. I just can't get going. I want things to be different, but I have no idea where to begin. I want positive change, but I feel like I'm in a rut. What should I do?" That made me come up with three steps to begin to change your life. 

Lani 00:54 Nice. What are those steps? 

Melissa 00:57 I think often times people just wish hypothetically, saying, "I wish I could stop smoking, or I wish I could move to France." Just throwing it out there, with no concrete plan to actually have it take place. I think that changing your life requires a few things. I decided to just break it down into three steps to begin to change your life. Number one is creating result-driven goals. This could be, for example, wanting to change your career. You can't just put that out there with no date attached to it. You need to say, by the end of 2023, I want to have a new job at a new place. It could also be some sort of goal. Take myself, when I was moving to France, I eventually had to put a date on the calendar. Everything revolved around the date. It would never happen if I just hypothetically said, "I'm going to move to France one day". The one day is never going to come if we don't start putting goals with intention and dates or numbers. 

Lani 02:23 When you said, I just can't get going, I want things to be different, you definitely have to make a goal. You have to pick one thing that you're going to focus on first, like your job, your marriage, where you want to live, or your weight or something. You can't just say everything in my life is bad. I want to change everything, isn't focused enough. Definitely, you should make SMART goals like those specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time bound goals so that you know exactly what you're going to head towards. 

Melissa 03:05 That's actually a great reminder, to quantify it, put it on paper. Exactly. 

Lani 03:14 You're definitely more likely to achieve goals. I was just looking into SMART goals this morning. Your goal should be clear and specific. That's, again, the first thing. It can't be everything that needs to change, it should be measurable so that you can track your progress. Your progress gets you motivated to keep on going to be attainable, realistic and achievable. You have to look at and think, is this a possibility? How long would it take? It should be relevant to be aligned with your values and your priorities. Not just depending on what other people think. Just like you said, you should have a deadline so you can stay focused on it. 

Melissa 04:09 If not, it just like sits out there infinitely. Without tangible things to hold on to or small steps, or something to make you feel like you're moving towards it, then you tend to set yourself up for failure. That might be too strong of a word, but you won't get going or you won't make any progress towards the goal or the life change that you're looking for. Which again, unfortunately is where happiness gets further and further away as well because you're disappointed and upset with yourself. That comes to number two, and understanding of the negative stories you continue to tell yourself that holds you back. You can have thoughts like "I'm not good enough, I'm not smart enough. Last time I tried this, I failed." You could have something from way back that you tried once, like "I tried to quit smoking and I failed", so this time I'll never succeed. Whatever the goal, the outcome is that you want to change your life. 

Lani 05:23 People don't know that the stories that they're thinking of are just thoughts that your mind makes up. You can see trying to change those, adjust those to whatever your goal is. When your client said, "I feel stuck. I've no idea where to begin. I'm in a rut", those are just ideas that your brain thought of that you can change. 

Melissa 05:53 If you change that "I feel like I'm in a rut" sentence to, "I feel like being optimistic today", you're taking that first step towards change. I don't want to oversimplify it, but when I say little statements like that, it sounds like all you have to do is change your thoughts. That's where it starts because if you're always having a negative thought pattern, obviously your outcome is going to continue to be negative. I think that thoughts, and negative thoughts specifically, definitely hold you back from beginning the process of change. 

Lani 06:26 I think it's really important to also know that your thoughts are what caused your feelings. If you want to be happier, the only way you can be happier is to change the thought that creates your happiness. Your thoughts also create your unhappiness. That is what causes you feeling your thoughts, not just your goal, or you're not achieving your goal. Achieving a goal could be good for somebody, could be bad for somebody. Some people actually just dismiss the happiness at the end of the goal, saying, "I'm not far enough", or "I need to make another goal", and they dismiss their happiness. 

Melissa 07:15 They keep pushing the goalposts further and further, and it's unattainable. 

Lani 07:20 Whatever goal you achieve, you're taking your brain along with you. You're taking your thoughts along with you. You're going to feel good and bad here. And you 're going to feel good and bad there, too. 

Melissa 07:32 Number three is understanding what is keeping you stuck. What within you creates the inability to take action? Which I think goes back to both number one, and number two. It's overwhelming, burnout, unconsciously limiting beliefs, which really goes back to number two. Having thoughts that continue to create self sabotage or some negative thoughts about something that happened in your past, and you think it's going to happen again in the future. Perfectionism. Being in forward motion towards a goal may not end well, but you are starting and building confidence by having your little fails and little mistakes which you learn from. 

Lani 08:50 People don't want to fail and don't want to make mistakes. Some good questions about that would be, "What would I be doing if I couldn't make a mistake? What would I be doing if I couldn't fail?" I think the real thing people are afraid of is beating up on themselves if they do make a mistake. Thinking something negative about themselves if they do make a mistake. Otherwise you wouldn't be afraid of it. 

Melissa 09:20 It's the fear of uncertainty, whether you're going to succeed or not succeed, or fail or whatever. It's the fear of uncertainty, whether you're going to succeed or not succeed, or fail or whatever negative connotation you want to attach to it. Not knowing and having that resistance to change is in there somewhere. If you're in a rut, the only thing you can do is change really or you continue in the rut. By being afraid of change or fearing uncertainty there's this story, it's like the dog on the tack story. There's a dog sitting on a tack and it keeps whining and some neighbor says to the dog's owner, "Why doesn't he move?" and the the basic premise is that he doesn't want to move because he's afraid if he gets off the tack, maybe the pain gets worse. By staying on it, he knows exactly what to expect. I think a lot of people are like that they'll keep themselves in a position where they're unhappy, and they don't want to make change, because they don't know what the outcome is going to be on the other side. But, they know what this outcome is and they continue that way. 

Lani 10:34 A lot of people are more afraid of what they don't know than what they already know, so they don't make any change. I think another important thing about understanding what's keeping you stuck, is that somehow what you're doing now is helping you, that your current story is helping. People that stay stuck usually they don't want to face the fear of what might be next. What might happen if I change? Fear of uncertainty. Judgment from yourself, judgment from others. A lot of people don't want to be judged by other people. Which if you change, you are going to be judged by it. 

Melissa 11:30 Become aware of all of this and actually start thinking about it. Think about your thoughts a lot. 

Lani 11:37 I wanted to go back to the beginning, where you said creating result driven goals. In coaching, we use this thing called the model. We use this formula that when we have our goals, we need to work backwards and figure out what kind of actions what we need to do to achieve our goals. What do we need to stop doing? We need to probably stop over analyzing and ruminating on different things that are going wrong and we need to actually start setting goals, start setting timelines, and things like that. 

Melissa 12:23 When you create a vision for yourself, you're working towards that. Versus ruminating on or catastrophizing something, you just continue to create more of the same. I'm excited to start exploring the model more as podcasts keep going. 

Lani 12:44 From there, we need to figure out what kind of feeling is going to drive those actions. We usually can't sustain motivation for whatever we're doing for very long, though. We have to come up with other feelings that'll keep us going, like being determined to get to our goal. Or come up with other feelings that'll keep us going, like being determined to get to our goal. For starting, people need to be courageous to take a different step. Then we need to be thinking about what thoughts are going to be fueling that feeling. 

Melissa 13:18 More productive thoughts. If that's the direction that you're trying to have a goal happen, then your thoughts have to support that. 

Lani 13:32 I think those three points are a really good place to begin to change your life. 

Melissa 13:40 Happiness is not as elusive as some may think. It's things like changing one's thoughts or feelings and trying to understand where these things come from. 

Lani 13:55 They might start with a question, asking yourself, "What if I didn't know where to start? What if I didn't know where to begin? What would I be doing?" 

Melissa 14:27 Maybe the last thing I might say is have a "why". A why for wanting to change your life. 

Lani 14:35 It's difficult to know what your "why" is. Do you have a way to figure out your why? 

Melissa 14:49 I decided last year to move to France, which I can't believe it's almost a year since I got here. I think it was because my "why" became being more present with my kids. It just became so apparent that needed to happen, and I don't think it was as big of a "why" earlier on. It was just a hypothetical thing. 

Lani 15:18 You had a good timeline because your kids had this certain age and a certain deadline, before they graduate high school. There was a certain time they wanted to move. 

Melissa 15:32 That aligned up and my "why" became bigger and stronger. That's just an example, but know that if there's a strong enough reason behind something, you're unstoppable. I think when you really want something, when you really want change, you can become unstoppable if your thoughts and your feelings support you.