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How to Change
It’s that time of the year when people make resolutions. Whether the goal is to lose weight, drink less alcohol or be more patient, change is hard. And to make change last is even harder. But there is a lot of hope that lasting change can be achieved, if you follow some simple rules:
- Don’t expect change to happen overnight. There is no consensus on how long it takes to form a new habit but there are some popular theories, like the 21/90 strategy. It postulates that if you commit to a goal for 21 straight days, it’ll have become a habit. The rule then encourages you to do it for another 90 days and claims that it will have become a permanent lifestyle change.
- Assess the level of difficulty to reach your goal. Some goals are harder than others. You are the judge of how difficult you think it’s going to be. The more difficult, the more it makes sense to break the goal down into sub-goals. For example, if you want to run the Boston Marathon in a year, you start off with short runs and then increase your speed and distance over time.
- Can you do it on your own? To continue with the Boston Marathon example, ask yourself, are you the kind of person who loves the solitude of running on your own or are you motivated by running with a group? There are groups for almost any goal you can imagine, including weight loss, anger control management and learning a new skill.
- Make your goal specific. By keeping your goal specific you make it measurable and there wn’t be any doubt about goal-attainment. This is easy with goals like weight loss, as you can count the pounds. It takes a little more creativity to make a qualitative goal specific, for example, if you want to learn how to be less explosive and respond versus react when you feel anger coming on, use a technique like counting backwards from 10 to zero before saying anything. You can then keep track of how often you’ve been able to do the backwards count as a metric.
- You have to want to change. If you are trying to make a change because you think you “should” make a change, you might find it difficult to follow through. For example, are you trying to control your anger better to save your marriage or are you tired of how you feel about yourself every time you lose your temper? Are you trying to lose weight because your doctor told you so or are you actually invested in your own long-term health? Most commonly, our motivation is a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic factors but without genuinely wanting to change something, it’s more difficult.
What matters most is that you plan your change in a way that is authentic to you and feels doable. It doesn’t matter what might work for somebody else. And it might take a period of trial and error to fine-tune your strategy. In addition, setbacks are almost a given and it matters how we handle those: don’t give up. Ok, so you ate that bar of chocolate last night in a moment of weakness. That’s not a good reason to give up and say you failed. Figure out how you can prevent this from happening in the future, maybe by not having any chocolate at home or by allowing yourself to have a small peace. Take charge of your own change and you can do it!
Therapy2Thrive™ brings Hope for Healing
Our counselors at Therapy2Thrive™ provide compassionate, practical, and evidenced based practices to assist you in the therapeutic process to meet your goals and find hope to heal the challenges you are facing.
Contact our family counselor in Pleasanton for private consultation.