Start Small and Start Somewhere!

What 1 thing do you want to do differently next year? There may be several things in your life you want to change. I know I do! 🙂 But we can’t do it all. Why? The biggest reason is that life changes generally take a lot of work and run much deeper than you think. Life changes are not the same as changing your breakfast preference, the brand of milk you use or the car you drive. These decisions are fairly easy, aren’t attached to a lot of emotion and are pretty superficial in nature. On the other hand, building your confidence to expand your business, learning to better cope with nerves before competition or dealing with anxiety about starting an exercise program are hard.

For 2015 choose 1 thing. What 1 thing is really bothering you and will make a huge difference if you work on it? I am going to use an example from above: starting an exercise program.Take out a piece of paper and write start an exercise program in huge letters in the middle of it and put a line through the middle of your paper from left to right. Next start mind mapping. Let the top half be the benefits of starting an exercise program? Let the bottom half be the mental and physical challenges of starting an exercise program; what gets in the way? This is an exercise in free association. You can also add anything else that comes to mind. This will start to tease out the reasons for doing it and the challenges around doing it. Do the benefits outweigh the challenges? What one physical challenge can you work on (you won’t be able to work on all of them but tackle 1)? What one mental challenge can you work on (you won’t be able to work on all of them but tackle 1)?

I can say with almost absolute certainty that the mental challenges will be the most difficult to deal with but they probably are what’s behind many of the physical challenges. Start small and start somewhere! You can’t move any quicker! You can’t skip steps! Overwhelming yourself is not going to help! Once you start small and start somewhere and you gain some success your confidence will grow! The things that have been on your new years resolution list every year will start to fade away!

Happy 2015! I am grateful and thankful that you’ve been reading my blogs all year long! Glad to be a part of your journey!

Dr. Michelle

Photo credit: www.flickr.com