Do you think that despite putting countless efforts, enough results aren’t coming? Does it seem that life isn’t fair with you?
Well, don’t know about you, but these thoughts used to arrive like a guest to me. Most of my life, I have been mediocre. I always wanted to change myself, but it’s easier said than done. I couldn’t resist myself from choosing instant gratification over the things that can change my life.
But one day, something magical happened to me, and my whole life went upside down. I started fulfilling my goals one by one. Most of my bad habits were left behind; I went on a journey of gratitude & prosperity. All these things happened just because of a mindset shift. Having the right mindset is very crucial.
In this post, you will get to know how a mindset shift changed my entire life.
In my past, I was desperately trying to improve myself. But no matter how many times I try, I used to encounter failure. Be it writing, reading, losing weight, I was failing in all of them. Surely, it doesn’t feel great to hit rock bottom every time. It seemed that the same trajectory followed up in every failure.
Initially, I would get super excited about making a significant change in my life. Then I would run towards taking actions. The first day ends smoothly, and the second & third day would also pass. Then, after one week, because of declining motivation, I used to stop working on my goals.
It’s true that no matter how consistent you are with your habits, it is inevitable that life will interrupt you at some point, and if you quit for any reason. You have to start over.
But my life changed after watching a video. One day in the afternoon, when I was lying on my couch and surfing through my YouTube feed, a TEDx talk came out in front of me. Lately, I was watching a lot of TEDx talk to motivate myself. But this video truly fulfills its purpose.
It was a talk by Stephen Duneier. He shared some great tactics that he used to achieve his goals while being an average. He remarks that “All I do is take really big, ambitious projects that people seem to marvel at, break them down to their simplest form and then just make marginal improvements along the way to improve my odds of achieving them.”
His video was all I needed. After questioning myself, I found that I was directly chasing big goals most of the time. This is the mistake that people usually make; they start chasing big goals. We need to understand that nothing happens overnight. Just like Rome was not built in a day, every progress demands time & consistent efforts.
After this, I started looking into my routine for making marginal adjustments. I decided to try once more but now by following Stephen’s footstep. I wanted to lose weight but never been able to perform the workout and eating healthy diet consistently. But this time, my focus wasn’t losing weight. I took the weight loss goal and broke that down into small goals, so small that my mind could not even give an excuse to achieve them. I wrote all of them in my notepad and went ahead with the flow.
It started with filling up my water bottle, lacing up my sneakers, grabbing my car keys, and making my way up to the gym. I was sure that once I show up in the gym, I have to do my workout. Things happened as expected, and I started making progress. The initial days were great, but I encountered the real results after a week. I was in shock because the first week was completed in a blink of an eye. It all happened because I shifted my entire focus from losing weight to the smaller goals required to lose weight.
With time, days turned into weeks and weeks into months. After three months, I finally reached my dream weight. Surely it was a great way to achieve anything. Just take one step at a time, and the results will follow on their own.
I started applying this great technique to all the areas of my life. Sometimes I used to procrastinate while writing. So I tried applying the same technique on this. It started with sitting on my chair, switching on my laptop, writing a word, a sentence, and a paragraph. The same thing happened; I wrote the article that I wanted to write for so long. I wrote countless articles with this technique.
Now I can write more articles, read more books, cook, swim, and recently I am taking online dance classes.
The compound effect of repeatedly showing off day after day leads to the really big changes in your life. If you dream big, that’s great, but you also need to start thinking small. Thinking about what small and simple changes you can make today that would completely change your life.
But it isn’t, of course, the full story; there were many moments of doubts, fears, and overthinking that have haunted me to stop the progress at every turn. Success only shows up when you don’t quit. There has been a time when I was tired of working on my daily goals and just wanted to jump on my couch. But if you persist, you will inevitably become successful.
ConclusionÂ
I used to think that life was made up of really big movements, like graduating from college, landing the job, getting married. But it isn’t true. As you get a bird’s eye view of your life, you will realize that life is made up of tiny actions that you take every day.
It’s great to dream big, but it’s essential to think small. It would be best to think about the tiny change that you can make today to change your entire life.