Well lately it seems like I’ve been doing a lot of talking about all these things I want to do but from my posts it doesn’t seem like I’ve been doing much in the way of acting on these ideas. Well guess again! Sure I have been doing a lot of thinking and plotting but I’ve definitely started getting to it. The main thing I wanted to do is make sure that before I wrote about it, I had something to write about.
The other day I talked about having to do the little things to lay the foundation to work on bigger things and that is exactly where I’m starting, at the foundation. In order to create a solid foundation for myself, I have to set myself up to gain control in my life. To do this, I need to get organized. Sounds like fun, right?! Not really and typically I would be looking at organization like a chore, but this time I’m looking at it as a way to give myself the best chance to succeed.
To say my life is chaotic is an understatement. You can just look at my apartment or my car and realize just how out of control I can let things get. Of course, I have tired time and time again to clean up my act and get the insanity under control but typically, I slide right back into my old messy, scattered patterns. If I was going to change myself and really make it stick, I knew I had to do it differently than I had before.
When we decide to change things about ourselves, we tend to go to extremes. We decide we want to do something like lose weight or get more organized or save money and the very idea of it all produces a surge of adrenaline that propels us to take on our project. Maybe we change our diets and cut out all fatty, unhealthy foods we love or we spend hours at the gym working out. To get organized, we could do an intense full cleaning of our homes, throwing things away just because we need to declutter or obsessively reorganizing every drawer or closet we have. And of course financially, you can stop spending money on anything and everything extraneous including going out with friends and pretty much having a social life. These are all extremes.
The main problem with extremes is that while they do produce results, they make the outcome very difficult to maintain. I’ve done the extreme way over and over again, each time with the same result. This time I needed to approach this all differently in hopes that I will maintain my results. What I’m trying to accomplish is a way of life for the long term, not the short. In order to set myself up to truly achieve success, I needed to gradually ease myself into a more neat, tidy and organized lifestyle.
Well it’s been about a month now and I have to say, I’ve seen results. Want to know what they are? Well that’s coming soon but the moral of today’s little story is that if you want to change, it’s all about setting realistic, attainable goals that allow you to gradually get used to a new way of life. Setting extreme goals is setting yourself up to fail but if you set an attainable goal, you will create change because every time you hit your target, you will feel empowered which will renew your belief in the possibility of change. It may even keep you moving beyond your original goal simply because of the motivation you feel having accomplished one objective.
“Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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