How to transform your life one day at a time?
I’m a motivation junkie. YouTube videos, blogposts and podcasts! I’ve consumed it all. It would be heck of a job for you to go on and assimilate all that content! (If you have the time, why not?) Lucky for you that you have a friend like me. Here are few tips that have helped me to begin the transformation towards a better me —
Know thy ‘Why?’
Often we tend to rush into things, without actually understanding the purpose behind it. I remember the new year resolutions that I used to make to transform my fitness. My ‘why?’ would be something naive like ‘impressing the world’. Needless to say, I could never keep up with my resolutions because my ‘why?’ wasn’t strong enough.
If you want to transform your life, start by telling yourself why you want to do it. Make sure the ‘why?’ is personal and not something you want to do for someone else! Now that you have told yourself why you want to do it, write down your ‘why?’ and revisit it whenever you feel like giving up.
Scale down
Transforming your life will definitely require action (hopefully, large amounts of it). But most of us tend to get intimidated by the magnitude of the actions. When I began looking at the actions that I would need to be a top Medium writer in the next six months, I realized that I needed at least 100 followers. That number is daunting for a rookie like me.
The solution was simple though! The action of getting 100 followers in 6 months can be scaled down to getting 6 followers in 10 days. A more manageable number. Isn’t it? Similarly if the actions that you need to take to transform yourself seem daunting, scale them down till they seem like achievable targets!
Focus!
I know full well that a journey to transforming one’s life will require actions in multiple aspects of life. For example, my definition of transforming my professional life meant, getting to the pinnacle of my fitness, being an established writer and getting to the top of my career. I needed to take action in multiple directions and that would be a sure way to fail!
If you want to transform your life, pick the most important aspect that you want to change and focus your efforts on taking action everyday to improve that aspect. Do it until, it’s a habit. Once its a habit you can go on and focus on another aspect.
Track
I’m sure we all know the underestimate the value of tracking in improving one’s life. I started using this simple app called Productivity to keep a track of my streak of transformation habits. Slowly but surely I started began to realize the benefits of tracking your streak. Some important benefits are —
- Satisfaction — Research shows that the scratching off items off your to-do list makes creates a positive feedback loop for the habit. It is a proven way to create positive habits!
- Account keeping — An app like the one I mentioned above, shows you how many days you have performed the habit. You can always look at that number to motivate yourself further.
- Snowball effect — As the number of days you perform a habit increase, the desire to increase the streak increases! If you push yourself to reach a certain number of days on your habit streak, it is highly likely that you continue the streak for a long period of time.
There you go! You now have four detailed steps that you need to take to transform your life, one day at a time. For heaven’s sake please don’t just be a reader, be a doer! Always remember —
Know thy ‘why?’ | Scale down | Focus | Track
