Making Difficult Changes – Tips and Ideas
Making difficult changes is something that we all face at one time or another in our lives. Some people breeze through change, some struggle with it but ultimately come through on the other side and some actively resist it or sabotage it.
Difficult changes in our life could mean anything, moving house, getting a new job, stopping smoking, loosing weight, ending a relationship, changing the dynamic within a relationship, dealing with and adjusting to the loss of a loved one.
According to Psychology Today
So how can we make difficult changes easier?
Below are 5 ideas for you to try out. Lets look at each idea with the example of losing weight.
- Don’t try to change too many things at once.
When you are trying to loose weight it can be easy to throw yourself into a diet where you get rid of all the “bad” food, cut your calories to a minimum, only eat fruit and vegetables (which you haven’t eaten much of before) and do lots of exercise (which you also haven’t done before). Now maybe this approach will work for you, or maybe you will loose some weight but as soon as you stop doing these things the weight returns.
Another way to approach this would be to just change one of the above. For example:
- Introduce more fruit or vegetables to your diet, try things out and find out what you like or
- Cut out processed sugar or
- Monitor your calorie intake and when you are ready cut it by a 100 calories or
- Start to do a 20 minute walk every day.
By doing just one of the above ideas you would be having a positive impact on your health and getting yourself ready mentally to make more changes.
2. Understand that making a change can involve making lots of little changes to make the big change happen
When you make just one change at a time you realize all the little changes that need to happen first even to change that one thing.
- If you are going to introduce more fruit and vegetables to your diet, you will need to change how you shop and cook.
- If you cut out processed sugar you will need to be mindful of it in the foods you eat and think about the places you go to eat, you will need to consider saying no to the biscuit or the chocolate when offered and think about alternatives.
- If you are going to monitor your calorie intake you will need to put aside time to write everything you eat down and work out your calories
- If you are going to walk 20 minutes a day, you will need to schedule that in or get up 20 minutes early.
You will be more likely to achieve your goal if you make one change at a time with all the little changes that come with it, rather than lots of changes all at once, feel overwhelmed and give up.
3. Break the change that you want to make down into smaller more manageable changes.
Saying that you want to loose weight is a large and vague goal. It is also something that is hard to control. You might say I want to loose a stone in the next 3 months, but that is actually hard to predict and hard to control happening. Your body will loose weight in the way it wants to at the pace it wants to. The only thing you can do is control what you eat and how much exercise you do. Sometimes letting go of the larger goal that you can’t control and putting your energy and efforts into smaller goals that you can influence is more productive.
If we take moving house as another example, often the process can take a long time, and whilst you can chase solicitors you can’t force things to happen straight away, what you can do is focus on what you can pack up, researching the place you are moving to, putting in place help for when you need it.
4. Understand the benefits of making the change and the drawbacks of staying where you are.
Understanding the motivation for the changes you want to make can be very important, what will you gain from the changes and what will the drawbacks be of staying where you are. Understanding the health benefits of loosing weight and the consequences to your health of not losing weight can make things feel real and be a great motivator for making the changes you need to.
5. Be consistent with your attempts to change.
Not many changes happen overnight, most take a long time and require you to consistently do things and think things in a different way. The biggest contributor to change is consistently doing something different
If you eat a calorific deficit for one day not much will change if you eat a calorific deficit 90 % of the time for 6 months you will loose weight. Equally if you go for a walk for one day, you won’t be much fitter or stronger if you do it consistently for 6 months you will be fitter and stronger.
A blog on our website that might help you with making changes is Micro Habits – Small Steps Equal Big Changes
If you are struggling with making a difficult change in your life then you might want to talk to a professional. Paul Carter is an Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) practitioner as well as a counsellor, psychotherapist. If you are looking for support, call Paul Carter now to book an appointment or to discuss your issues further. At the moment, Paul is only working online or the telephone due to COVID. To make an appointment please call Paul on 07843 813 537 or fill in the form on the Contact Page, if he doesn’t answer he is probably in a session, please leave him a message and he will call you back as soon as he can.