In this short and sweet episode, I talk about 4 of the most common reasons why people struggle to change and make positive differences in their lives.
Transcript
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Minimal Minds Podcast. I’m your host. My name is Alex and today we’re going to be talking about behavior change. Specifically, why is it so difficult and why are you struggling? I’m going to be talking about four reasons and if you can sort out these four reasons i’m going to be talking about well, I can guarantee you’re going to find behaviour change a whole lot easier.
So, wasting no time, reason number one is lack of clarity. This is where most people fall down. They know they want to change, but they don’t specifically know what they want their life to look like. They haven’t taken the time to actually be very specific and write down everything they want. And how they’re going to get it.
Just like how using a GPS in a car is completely useless if you don’t put a destination, you are not going to change for the better if you don’t know what positive change actually looks like. So this is the first thing you should be doing when you’re trying to improve your life. You need to write down what is it specifically that you don’t like at this current moment in time.
What do you want to improve, and let’s say you do improve it, what does that look like? What is your life going to look like when you’ve implemented these changes? And then you can assess what are these changes that you’re going to implement. You’ve got to be very, very, very specific.
The second reason why you struggle to change and improve your life is because you’re not leaving your comfort zone.
You cannot grow and improve if you’re not having new experiences and new experiences are pretty much by definition Usually uncomfortable. All the self growth you’re ever gonna have is outside of your comfort zone. That’s just a fact of life. Now I’m not gonna lie, leaving your comfort zone is really difficult.
Um, if this is something you specifically really struggle with, the best thing I can suggest is just taking extremely small baby steps. Like you don’t learn how to drive on the road on your first day. You’ve gotta learn how to use the pedals and learning how to steer properly and learning how the gearbox works and so on.
If you can do things that are very, very small that just make you a little bit uncomfortable, eventually your comfort zone will… slightly grow, and then you can do another thing that’s slightly uncomfortable. And if you keep doing that, if you keep repeating that process, let’s say you do that 50 times, well then after those 50 times, you’ll be doing stuff that you didn’t even imagine that you could do.
So here’s an example. Uh, when I was 16, I wasn’t very good with people. Um, I have this very vivid memory of being in the car with my mum, and she asked me to go into the shop to get her something. And it was just a completely normal request, but I I physically could not go into the store because I was scared of talking to the person on the till.
In hindsight, none of this actually really makes any sense. But for some reason there was a fear in me stopping me from going in that shop and just buying something. And then fast forward a few years, when I was 23, I moved to the other side of the planet on my own. For two and a half years. And if you asked me at 16 whether I could do something like that, I’d say you’re crazy.
But how I got to that point is I just kept doing very small things that made me uncomfortable. Pretty much all progress in life is just baby steps over a very long period of time. So let’s say you’ve always wanted to travel the world on your own, but the prospect of that just seems too daunting.
Something you could do is you could go to a place that you already know with a friend, then you could go to another place that you don’t know, with a friend and then after that you could try going to another place that you don’t know with a friend. But then have a day where you just walk around on your own. After that you could go to a English speaking place. Another country on your own and then after that go to a non english speaking country on your own and just keep upping it slightly. So yeah, like I said lots of baby steps over a very long period of time and you can achieve anything.
Number three, Third reason why you struggle to change is because your reasons for trying to change are not compelling enough.
People will do more to avoid pain than to pursue pleasure. So if you’re on your self improvement journey but your life’s pretty good already, then you may not feel like the absolute need to change. It’s easy just to be happy with the status quo and just plod along. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but if you’re relying on a reason like, “oh, I think it’d be cool to have a six pack”, then you’re probably not going to make it.
If you don’t take the time to create a list of compelling reasons of why you want something, you’re more likely to give up when it starts getting difficult. Well, how do you make a compelling reason? Well, in my opinion, it’s better to use fear as a motivator than desire. So, I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you want to get really fit.
Instead of looking at it through the lens of my life will be significantly better, you want to frame it as my life will be significantly worse if I don’t keep fit. And then list out all the experiences you’ll miss out on because you didn’t take the time to get fit. And then you can list out the regrets you’d feel when you’re an old person because you didn’t do that thing.
And here’s the thing, you’ll never regret doing the hard thing after you’ve done it. It’s hard in the moment, but can you ever think of a time when you did a hard thing that objectively improved your life, and having regretted it after? You can’t do it. No one regrets doing good things in their life. But a lot of people regret not doing the things that they should have done.
So use that knowledge as fuel, and I’m sure your future self will thank you. And the final reason why you struggle to change is because you’re not making it easy enough. Now this is a very common thing for new people in this space, but people tend to really overcomplicate everything when it comes to self improvement.
Like, you don’t have to get up at 4am and go to the gym and grind out a 3 hour session every single day to improve your life. All you have to do is something slightly better than you’re already doing, and technically, you are improving. So instead of going to the gym every day for 3 hours, why not do something really easy like just going on a walk for 15 minutes a day.
That is still gonna have amazing benefits for your life and it’s next to no effort. So yes, please stop overcomplicating things.
Okay, to summarize the four reasons why you struggle to change. Reason number one is a lack of clarity Reason number two is you’re not leaving your comfort zone. Number three is your reasons aren’t compelling enough and Reason number four is you’re not making it easy enough.
Well, that’s everything I have for you today I hope you gained value from this short and sweet episode If you’d like my ebook titled The Self Development Starter Guide, you can get it for free by signing up to my self development newsletter at theminimalminds.com. And if you want to support the show, check out the link in the description.
Thank you so much for listening, and I’ll see you in the next episode.
