What does your social media feed look like right now? If it’s anything like mine, it’s all about
- Veganuary / Dryanuary / Dietanuary or any variation of using the phrase ‘anuary!
- New Year, New You! Wow, this phrase is everywhere right now!
- Get healthy in 2020 / get fit in 2020 / change your life in 2020. So many 2020s!
That’s a lot of change and a hell of a lot of pressure for a new year!
So, let’s look at your options for this year.
You can slow it down a little. Thinking about wanting to make changes to your life takes time! It involves firstly just taking stock, looking at your life and where it’s at right now. What’s working for you right now and what isn’t? Just looking at your current state of life can take ages and that can be a good thing! After all, who has the time to even take stock?
Or, you might have just spent the past month, six months, year, doing all of that – taking stock and realising that something needs to change and NOW! We’re all so busy in life that it often can take one event, one surprise, one disappointment for us to say “bugger, I don’t want to do that again, what do I do now?” You could already be at the stage of wanting to make some changes now, right now, no more waiting, no more thinking about it. This is where all of those social media ‘make change now’ hook you. Yes, that’s good marketing but it might not be what you need right now.
Sitting back and taking stock or ready to change right now both lead to initial questions from me (or any good life coach):
- What is most important to you in your life and why?
- On a scale of 1 -10 (1 being not at all and 10 being extremely) how happy are you with your life right now? What are the things that make you happy?
- On a scale of 1-10 (1 being not at all and 10 being extremely) how motivated are you in your work/personal life? What motivates you?
- On a scale of 1 -10 (1 being not at all and 10 being extremely) how stressed do you feel right now – what are your key stress points?
If you’ve already been thinking about your life a lot, these will be easy questions for you. If you know you need to start thinking about your life and making change but need to take stock of where you’re at right now, these questions can be really hard to work through. But making change is hard and it should be hard! To use an example from the diet industry, lose weight fast sounds fantastic for those of you who are time-poor and think you are overweight. But, what really happens is you spend a fortune on a new product or regime and, when you stop spending money on it, the weight comes back.
To get past all that social media ‘change in 2020’ blah, you need to put the time in, be motivated, put the effort in. To make changes in your life that are sustainable and create habits that you can take forward in life beyond any coaching session, you have to put the work in. Don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t have to be a slog, far from it. But, you will cry, you will laugh, you will realise things about yourself that you never knew. These are all good things.
So, to start thinking about slow or rapid change in your life this year, I’m going to suggest you do two things.
- Take twenty minutes to sit quietly with yourself and honestly answer those questions above for yourself. You don’t have to show them to anyone else, they’re just for you.
- Take a couple of hours, get yourself some cake, coffee, treat of your choice and work through the Year Compass. This is a booklet that I love. It gets you to take stock on 2019 (if you haven’t already) and uses some fantastic tools to get you to start thinking about how you want your 2020 to happen. This isn’t an ad, I don’t gain anything from you downloading their booklet, I just think it’s a fantastic tool and I’m always keen to pass on fantastic tools to you, dear reader, who is sitting there thinking about how to make some changes in your life. Again, it’s a tool that’s completely offline, no one sees it but you.
That’s it for today, the second day of 2020. I’m off to unfollow all those ‘anuary and ‘new year, new you’ accounts – cats are much more fun to follow 🙂
