Penumbra Photo Credit https://www.flickr.com/photos/penumbra/
Yuk! Look at that sink, take a good look. Horrible isn’t it! Makes me shudder just to look at it.
Now imagine widening your gaze out from that sink and taking in the rest of the kitchen, imagine what it looks like; empty food wrappers, half eaten sandwiches going moldy on plates piled high on the table, empty cereal boxes lying on the counters, the floor sticky and damp from stains you don’t want to investigate too closely.
Next take a look at the rest of the house, the dirty, dusty carpets and curtains, the damp walls, the wallpaper peeling off, the furniture torn and broken and rotting away. Something scurries past behind the sofa!
I’d be out that door like a rocket, slamming it behind me and never going back.
But, if I had to, if that was my new reality, where the hell would I start?
With that sink. That’s where I’d start.
And sometimes in life, the mess we live in creeps up on us and we’re not aware of it until we’re standing knee deep in sh!t. Not necessarily physical mess, but emotional, mental mess caused by tortuous relationships, poor choices made in dealing with work, bosses, life.
When life gets like that, when you don’t know where to start or what to do but you know something, sometimes everything, has to change; what do you do?
Here’s where we can often go wrong, because we want to make a change, sometimes a big one in our lives and we try to do it all at once. That need to do it all, to change everything has capsized so many of my new starts, my new projects and intentions for better, healthier living.
I would advise you to stay away from attempting a grand sweeping change; rarely does this work for anyone.
Instead, pick just one thing to do every day. And when I say one thing, I really mean one thing only.
Photo by Andre Chinn
Say you’re goal is to reduce clutter; start by simply throwing out one thing, just one, every day. Just one thing.
You can progress to filling up a box and throwing it out later, right now you are looking to build that muscle of clearing clutter every day, and to do that you need to make it easy.
If you are lost in a bleak dark depression, your one thing that could lead to changing everything could be that today you will get up and make your bed. That’s it. That’s your one thing and that can be tough enough.
Your next step might be to shower every day and put on outside clothes. Don’t go outside, you’re not ready yet, remember you’re building your muscle by doing just one thing.
If you’re Lifechanger goal is to improve your personal fitness, then figure out what you’re starting point is and pinpoint that one thing that will move you forward from where you are right now. You may need to have a discussion with a professional fitness instructor to help you assess your current state and to devise a plan to get you to where you want to be. Regardless of the fitness level you wish to achieve, you will stick to that plan if you start with just one relatively easy thing for you to do every day.
The big problem with most of us when we are faced with the need to make a change, whatever that change is; we focus on the end result we want and think up extreme and sometimes complex strategies that will get us there fastest.
If its weightloss, we imagine embracing a harshly restrictive diet combined with an intensive exercise programme will be the thing to get us to our ideal body shape.
However as the multi billion dollar diet and weightloss business shows us time and again, failure is all such strategies offer us because we don’t stick to them for the duration necessary.
Instead of trying to drop all the excess weight we’ve built up over the years in a matter of weeks or months, surely we can all accept that its much easier and much healthier to drop a pound a week, every week and slowly yet almost inevitably reach that target weight and ideal shape.
A pound a week could be dropped by simply changing one poor dietary habit, such as not eating a doughnut every day or skipping our mid afternoon chocolate bar. The cumulative effect of this one change means we win our goal of improved health and better fitting clothes. It will take a little longer but because it is such a small change, you’ll stick to it.
Just one thing works for business and job changes you might wish for too.
If you are looking to retrain for a new career, break your goal down until you make a start with just one thing.
Often times when we create a to-do list, we often put what amounts to a project as a simgle task on our list. For instance, when asked what they need to do to improve their lives, I’ve had clients say things like: lose 30 pounds, run a half-marathon, clear clutter from the garage, increase customer referrals, improve love life, retrain for new job or even rebuild my life after personal crisis.
That’s a big to-do and its almost offputting because it seems too big; it becomes overwhelming.
What is it you want to change in your life? Write down that thing you want to change and take some time to contemplate it. Is it too big to think about where you’d even start?
A simple but incredibly useful thing I learned this year is that there’s a big difference between projects and tasks and we often don’t even realise this and mislabel projects as tasks. And because they’re projects, they’re big and unweidly and we don’t know where to start and then we get disheartened and never start or start and stop over and over again.
Look at the change you wrote down that you wanted to achieve in your life, and start to break it down from the end result you want to where you are now. Working backwards from that state you want figure out what one thing you needed to do to get there from the previous stage, right back to your current position.
Lets stick with clearing clutter from the garage as an example. The ideal is to have a garage that’s free of rubbish, old tools, dried up paint pots, broken toys, odd bits of machinery, old newspapers and whatever else you’ve accumlated and dumped in there over the years.
The ideal is to have a garage with everything in its place and it even has space for you to park your car in it!
The last task to get that pristine garage might be to hang your tools on the wall.
Before that, it could be painting tool outlines on the wall.
Before that, hanging cycles from the wall or ceiling hooks.
Before that, it might be taking boxes to charity shops, recycling depots or the municipal dump.
Right back, action by action to today’s one thing which could be taking one piece of junk, just one newspaper and putting it in the bin. Today! Just one thing!
Ha! you might say. That will take forever, I’ll never get it finished if I do it like that, one thing at a time.
Consider this: imagine walking out to your junk filled garage, lifting up the door and looking in. Every square foot of floor is piled high with boxes of something from sometime that you meant to sort through and sort out what was worth keeping or throwing.
Wow, just look at that and the dust catches you’re throat as you edge your way in through a gap in the boxes. Today’s the day!
You’ve been promising yourself and your family that you’d get this done for months and today you’re going to do it. You’re going to clear all the junk out and end up with a tidy work bench, usable easy to find tools and room to park the car.
You’ve cleared Saturday or Sunday or even a whole weekend for this job and you’re going to get it done.
Now, honestly, think about how you feel as you open up the door and you look into that dark dusty space, at the mountain of boxes filled with God knows what. Look at that in your imagination and notice how you feel.
Are you excited to get stuck in? I don’t think so! Not even close!
You might be annoyed, frustrated or simply pissed that you have to give up your precious free time for this ugly dirty chore.
Do you want to close the door and creep away, telling yourself you’re not in the right mood to get it done, or you’ve got a backache/headache/flu coming on?
Okay, now imagine you opening up that same garage door, walking over to one of the boxes and lifting out a newspaper, walking out and putting it in the bin. Job Done! Whoohoo!
How easy was that? So easy you could do it again tomorrow? Yep, of course you could and you will.
We want change to be easy, so you’ll do it again tomorrow and the next day and the next day and the one after that until it becomes a habit that sticks.
Don’t fall into the trap of doing more, because when you do too much in one day, you’ll use that as an excuse not to do anything the next because look how much you’ve already done. Just one thing, please.
And when you’ve done your one thing, you celebrate it like you’ve won a gold medal!
At the minute for me, its writing, because I keep putting it off, so just one paragraph a day and then I celebrate like I’m Usain Bolt winning at the Olympics.
There’s actually a good reason for this. Let me explain. Say you’re one thing is to put on exercise clothes and shoes. Not to go out and exercise yet, you’re not ready for that, but you have been incredibly brave and motivated in putting on your fitness gear.
If you’re anything like most of us, you immediately start beating yourself up, saying that you’re not doing enough, that you need to actually exercise to reach your goal.
No! Don’t listen to that critical little ass we all seem to have our own version of inside our heads. I want you to instantly negate that harsh criticism by congratulating yourself on a job well done. Say out loud, ‘Wow, I’m amazing, I did it, yes I did.’ Do a happy dance – Go you!
When you achieve something and celebrate yourself, your brain releases lovely happy chemicals like dopamine to reward you for that great job you’ve just done.
I want you to relish this amazing feeling, imagine the tingle as it flows through your whole body; down to your fingertips, down to your toes and everywhere inbetween.
Do your happy dance and shout ‘Yes! I did it!’
This might feel silly at first however I want you to go for it. Set aside your inhibitions and astonish yourself at how easily you can make yourself feel so good. And as you keep doing this every day, after doing your just one thing, you create a feel good loop, whereby you take action that serves you, you get rewarded for it and you look forward to doing it again tomorrow.
You’re training your brain to want to clear clutter or train for a marathon or simply to get up and make your bed.
After a few days of that one thing, you’ll be ready to progress to the next thing, whatever it is and you’ll start to do a little more and little by little, day by day you change your life in the way you want it to go.
You’ll be surprised at how quickly you start to see progress, how smoothly you transition from where you currently are to where you want to be.
Photo by Nathan Siemers
To-Do List Tip
To actually come up with a list of tasks to do, take anything that requires multiple steps and break it down into each stage, each one becoming a to-do task.
Take projects off your to-do list and keep them on a separate ‘Projects to Accomplish’ list. As you start each project, break it down into a list of simple achievable tasks in order of required completion.
Cynthia Curry 