How to make changes stick? Any new change or positive improvement you make in your life will be met with resistance, either internally or from your outer experience. This is because in order for an authentic change to occur, you must be willing to adopt new habits and behaviours, and leave old ones behind. In some cases this may include relationships, friends, clients, places, positions and opportunities. Here’s a breakdown of my top-ten recommendations to galvanise positive change.
1. Enrol Key Players
Once you’re clear on the change you wish to make and COMMIT to the process, declare this to the people involved that are key to your success. This may include stakeholders, a team, your clients, colleagues, family or friends. You may decide to announce this in a group or more personally, however either way your communication should be clear, simple and resolved to invoke their trust and support.
2. Give up Co Dependents
Quite simply, if a group or person is not aligned with your vision and commitment to positive change, you must find the courage and compassion to let them go. This may sound harsh but in fact is doing yourself and the person a favour by following your inner guidance. Rather than confront, blame or justify their behaviour, simply remove your energy and attention altogether. Soon they will get the message and take another direction where Life will teach them what they need to learn and evolve.
3. Establish New Rituals
Until a positive change becomes the ‘new norm’ it can feel like an added burden to your already complicated life. How many times have you tried adopting a new health regime only to find internal or external pressures derailing your efforts? The key is to create simple yet powerful rituals that are CENTRAL to your life and daily activities, until they are accepted as the norm. In business this means creating streamlined systems to facilitate best outcomes.
4. Eliminate Old Habits
Positive change requires strong intention and daily effort to become a stable condition. It’s important to face what isn’t adding direct value to your plans and goals, and eliminate or moderate its influence.. for example blobbing out with TV, video gaming, excessive drinking or over-eating, procrastination, justifying old behaviours and subtle avoidances.
5. Focus Strengths
Discover your strongest belief and deepest conviction for what you wish to create and why you deserve it. When you empower yourself with natural confidence and trust in your Journey, others will find empowerment in your presence and be inspired to express their highest potential. If creating a group, company or collective change, this makes you unstoppable.
6. Outsource Support
Why struggle doing something you dislike or are not proficient at when another person may love and excel in that exact function? By empowering another or outsourcing to an expert, you can turn a weakness into the most valuable asset, stay focused on what you love to do, and do it better than anyone else.
7. Stay in Balance
Avoid setting unrealistic goals that create stress and reduced your performance. Knowing where you are and where you wish to get to, every step will be taking you there. The famous British explorer Sir Ralph Fiennes called this his “polar plod”, where he steadily kept moving toward his destination when others set off at a racing pace, then failed.
Staying in BALANCE as a daily habit will help you sustain performance in business, family or personal endeavours.
8. Get help where you need it
So many strategies or people embark on doing something and don’t get the right support. Don’t outsource everything but do get the support you need it to set yourself up for success.
9. Use the Power of COMMITMENT
Using rituals and routines help you and your team stay committed. Now there are apps available to automatically prompt you with regular empowering ideas, actions and outcomes to focus on. You can also use mind-mapping, whiteboard, paper & pen or any other system to visually & viscerally establish your goals, track changes required and progress made on the journey.
As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe famously wrote:
“Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.
All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance which no one could have dreamed would come their way.”
10. Review, Revise, Respond!
During my Army Training we learned that a plan is only current until you begin implementing it. The plan is critical for a focused, strategic approach, but implementing the plan will inevitably require constant review and revision, then RESPONSE to achieve the highest outcomes.
Cycle of Change
These 10 points have been proven again and again in my own life, as well as many clients’, however a sequential Cycle of Change program is highly recommended if you are serious about stepping up your game. This personalised program make you aware of your potential through a staged process of insight, understanding, planning, action, reflection and inspiration to keep you moving forward towards your destination.
