How to Change my Lifestyle - Lowering the Bar

By dougnau on May 6, 2008 in Goal Setting, Life Coaching, Lifestyle Change, Success

As a webmaster of a site that is dedicated to personal growth, coaching and lifestyle change, a common query that I see users searching for is ‘where or how do I start?’ in terms of making lifestyle change. It’s a beautiful question, the quality is one of possibility, hope and purpose - mixed in with some uncertainty and hesitation.

This article is written to provide some coaching on the question - where do I start, and to support you in developing a plan that will give you the optimal chance of making long lasting lifestyle changes.

Start with a Decision

If you’ve read this far, clearly you’ve got an area you are willing or interested in changing/improving. Whether its your health and wellness, your financial situation, your relationships, etc., the starting point for change is always the same. Its simply making a decision.

This decision is bigger than just giving lip service to the next project you’d like to participate in; its a real decision. One which has value to you. One which you know is worth working for. One that excites and scares you at the same time because it means that there is something out there for you that you are not experiencing now. It means that you are opening yourself up for uncertainty and you are comfortable with the unknown. It means that this change is important enough to you that you are willing to reject the path of least resistance and you are ready to dedicate yourself to a proven process for success when you know right now that this will not be easy!

Ask yourself what your experience is as you read the previous paragraph. Does it excite you? Does it make you nervous? Does it facilitate an emotional charge? Are you having self doubts? Good! If so, you are on the verge of making a decision with significance and importance. If you’ve got no such reaction, either the change is so small that its a no-brainer, or it really does not matter to you. Re-read the previous paragraph and consider your current state of being to assess how important this truly is to you.

Become Clear

You’ve made a decision to make a lifestyle change and now you ask ‘what next’? Consider the following two common scenarios. You would like to get healthy and you want to make a lot of money. Sounds great - I am making that decision. OK - what’s that really mean? Become so clear for yourself that you know exactly what that looks like. Does it mean I drop 20 pounds and make six figures? Elaborate. What am I doing that I love that makes me lose 20 pounds, how will I feel, what will others be saying. If I am making six figures, am I making $100,000 or am I making $999,999. What does my life look like such that I am making this kind of money.

There is no better way that I know of to gain clarity than to write your vision statement. In fact, whether you are looking to make significant changes or just to cruise through life, I recommend this process to everyone. Now, I will not outline the process again here as I’ve got a number of articles written on the topic already, but I would like to express the utter importance of this step one more time. This is imperative as the simple process will attract what we want to our lives by raising our own awareness of the opportunities available to us each and every day. It can be done in a few hours and its value is as big as the value of your vision coming true.

Lower the Bar

If you’ve frequented this site in the past, you’ve likely read all about my 10 steps to success, and I suspect you’ve got a good grasp of developing goals, taking action and growing through the process. In reading all these steps you might think that there are a lot of things you need to do to make your dreams happen. If you are familiar with my work, this may come as a big surprise to you, but I am a huge believer in lowering the bar.

What exactly does this mean? We are all conscious of the term ‘raising the bar’, a slogan that came out in corporate America decades ago. The idea was that we could raise our expectations, do more, accomplish more. This is all good, and certainly from a corporate perspective its a fantastic choice - get more out of your employees, more production, more commitment, more hours - and with the accountability and support of a corporate structure it worked! But raising the bar does not always translate into our personal lives. When we set expectations high to change areas of our life that we may have spent years developing, there is an incredible inertia that can be difficult to overcome. Rather than creating a lofty goal with high expectations, often the people that have the biggest success are those that set a series small goals and build on those changes.

When someone ‘lowers the bar’, they might change their weight loss goal from 50 to 10 pounds. Even better, they might pick a small nutritional change like cutting out soda’s, and forget the weight number altogether. Once they’ve got that down, they pick the next change to tackle rather than doing everything at once. People that lower the bar celebrate their accomplishments and build on successes rather than their immediate failure to lose 50 pounds.

Make sure to keep your Life Vision

Lowering the bar does not mean altering your vision. Create the vision that truly makes your heart sing. Ask yourself what is most important to you? What do you really want - express what’s in your heart. The vision process is not about goal setting, its about becoming clear on what matters to you the most.

When I speak of lowering the bar, I refer to the fact that its easier to make small changes and build on those successes than it is to flip the switch and change everything all at once. Give yourself the best likelihood of success by creating the vision, then attainable, and relevant small goals which steer you in that direction.

I am certainly not saying that its not possible to change your life in one day. I know I did exactly that on the day that I was diagnosed with Chronic Myeloid Leukemia. After all, I had a pretty huge motivating factor. Search deep and ask yourself if you can succeed in that model. Is your reason to change that compelling and immediate. Do you have an accountability and support system in place. If so, you may be able to raise the bar in your own life. Determine the model that you feel you can embrace and keep in mind that most people have lasting success when they set small goals with a long term perspective that rejects corporate America’s policy of raising the bar. Instead lower the bar today, and create a sequential ladder to success rather than setting it so high that its impossible to jump over with one single bound.

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