If you are reading this article it is because have you thought about giving up everything and going to manage a refuge in the mountains. Or a chiringuito by the sea. In short, you are thinking about how to change your life and succeed once and for all.
After all one of the most numerous searches on search engines in 2022 was how to change. In the sense of how to change life, work, rhythms, priorities. It is the long wave of the pandemic, and of the Great Resignation, which is not satisfied with a little more flexibility or smartness, a 4-hour week or a different climate in the office. The latter have have messed up the life plans of a lot of people who really want to make a U-turn of one’s existence and somehow start over.
The dream about how to change your life that fades at dawn
Changing life is the typical umbrella speech, or New Year’s Eve, with the usual good intentions that then vanish on the first day of returning to work. Like a waking dream. Yet cyclically, examples of those who really did it appear on sites and social networks. And everyone is always happy, to the point of declaring that they would never go back.
So what to do? Crawling forward hoping the finish line is getting closer so you can pass it on your knees? Or give us a clean break and start again in another race of life? In the second hypothesis, here are 7 cornerstones to be carved in stone. Why change is a hard and tiring processto be done with extreme rigour. And changing life is even more so. So ask yourself these questions and give yourself the most honest answers you can.
1. Ask yourself why you want to change
We humans we are beings of habit, as are many of the animals that live around us. We hate change, we experience it as a source of stress. We prefer Pavlovian to have our daily sop instead of working hard to achieve the result we dream of.
Just think about physical fitness: we all want a fit, toned, proportionate body, but few manage to do what needs to be done, that is, eat well and move enough.
With life it is the same: we all would like to wake up in the morning surrounded by birds singing or the lapping of the wavesbut then we are always queuing on the ring road or squeezed into crowded public transport.
After all most of the changes in our life happen at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons:
1. When we hit the bottom of the barrel. And often we fall into a similar situation.
2. When we get carried away by the enthusiasm of the moment. Typically “new year, new life” hence the gym membership that ends up in the desk drawer after a week, or the healthy diet that crashes in front of the first fast food restaurant.
So before you change, ask yourself why you want to do this. And give yourself a positive answer, with a long-term vision of what and who you want to become. You have to see yourself with your eyes open 10 years from now, in the flesh, and this must trigger a deep motivation that works in good times and in bad times
2. Make a long-term plan
For the same reason we are social animals of habit, we are also beings who tend to overestimate short-term results and underestimate long-term ones. Put simply: “then we’ll think about it”. Then instead at the first difficulties you give up on the new road and retrace your steps.
Instead, a long-term strategy is needed, in which all the variables are put together, from time to resources (physical, mental, economic) and then multiplied by at least two. Because if you’ve tried to furnish a new home, you know very well that the effort and costs are always double what you had imagined. Here you are, changing life is like moving house but to the nth degree. Plus the fact that you don’t have a precise address but only a direction of travel.
3. Focus on changing habits, not small events
The small events are giving up the chocolate offered by the colleague on her birthday. Habits are to pour a whole sachet of sugar into the coffee at the bar every morning. Giving up the chocolate seems to be making who knows what sacrifice when in fact it’s just a detail among wrong habits repeated over time.
That’s how we are done, habits and with a certain squint of priorities. It’s what has allowed us to evolve over time, but it’s also what prevents us from making big changes. So focus on your habits, focus on the ones that are preventing you from changing, and focus on changing those. It will be difficult to change them but there is good news: once trained, they will make that change natural and it will then be much more difficult for you to go back to your old life. And then you can give yourself the chocolate without guilt. Read more: How to change bad habits (for real).
4. Don’t tell yourself stories
Do this: make a list of 20 trusted people and write or talk to them telling them that you want to change your life, that you have a project, that you have a dream to achieve. At least 19 they will try to dissuade you, they will tell you to let it gothat it’s not true that the situation is so gray, that it’s just a passing moment, that it’s okay anyway, that things will improve anyway… That’s how we are, and in order not to change we tell ourselves stories that we know very well are not true. Fibs to excuse ourselves.
Do you really want to change your life? Listen to the stories of those who have succeeded, and find in them the key to doing it too.
5. Make time
Another excuse for those who would like to change but basically don’t want to: I don’t have time. It is not true, it’s true that you don’t want to take control of your schedule and sweep away everything that prevents you from changing.
If you’re really thinking about how to change your life, think of a clean slate on your agenda: throw away everything that isn’t functional to change right now. Yes, even an aperitif with friends, because in your new life there will certainly be neither one nor the other…
6. Live as if the change has already happened
Act as if you’ve already made that change. Your old comfort zone, your mental patterns, the people around you who will never have the courage to do what you want to do, are powerful deterrents to your change. Imagine that you have already reached the other side: nothing you do today will be there anymore. So why wait to shed the ballast of your old life?
7. Give yourself a reward
Changing your life is a tough, vicious, cynical and from a certain point on without return. Every time you pass a gate that won’t reopen to let you back in, give yourself a reward. It will mark the stages of your journey towards your new life.
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