Changes You can Live With

Give it some thought -- how many changes do you really want to make in your life? How many people are in your life telling you to make some changes (besides yourself)?

Has your doctor given you this advice:
"Honey, you need to lose some weight."
"Ms. (or Mr.) X you need to reduce your stress levels."

"Eat healthier."
"Move more"
"Get more sleep"
"Work less" (from your kids)
"Work harder" (from your boss)
"Stand up straight" ... actually, to be honest, I really agree with this one and say it to my people 400 times a day.

But you get my point. There's a lot of change we are being pressured to make. A lot of people in our lives are telling us we need to do things differently.

And we try....to change, to please them, to appease them so they just shut up.

But we have forgotten an important part of the change process.

1. Understand where you are
2. Decide where you want to go
3. Figure out the way to get there (and this is the REALLY important part) in a way that lets all the positive things you do with your life stay in their places.

We let changes overhaul our entire life structure -- and we can't sustain that much change. So we struggle for a while and eventually go back to our old habits (feeling like failures all the way) because we just took on too much all at once.

We are capable of making all those changes -- we just need to do it in a fashion that doesn't undo the rest of our delicately balanced lives.

My clients are all successful people. People successful in business, in health care, in finance. They make lots of decisions everyday for work, create career plans for others, manage to a bottom line. But they take a different approach with themselves. The same amount of professional growth time they give to an associate, they expect to conquer in half the time (or less), when they outline their expectations for their development of weight management skills. --They honestly believe they should know how to do this already, so they are already behind.

NOT SO! Our culture has spent your lifetime teaching you the skills you know to control your weight. Look around -- if you are struggling, so are a great many other people who learned the same lessons from the same culture. You can't redirect a whole life's worth of teaching in just a couple afternoons.

Make a couple changes you can easily live with. Let them become the new normal and then make some more. You will get there -- and just as important, You will be able to stay there!