Small Changes, Big Results

Holy cow, it is hard to make changes. We, as human beings are creatures of habits, we follow predictable patterns. You do the same things the same way over and over again, you think about how you wake up every day, think about how you go to bed, you get out the door, you go to work, all of these things, how you handle your kids, your spouse, but do a lot of the things the same way over and over again. And for the most part. Well, I shouldn’t say that. Sometimes that’s a huge benefit. Is what I’m doing getting me closer to what I want? Is it getting me what I want? Totally? Or is the way that I’m doing things? The very definition of insanity, where I’m doing same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result. And why is it? Why is it that we have to face some extreme reality or had some kind of a rock bottom or get some terrible news before we finally sort of shake out of it and realize, oh, my gosh, this is not sustainable. The way that I’m doing things, the direction that I’m going, it’s not only getting me where I want to go, it’s really getting me further and further away from it every single day. And the unfortunate reality is that this stuff gets harder. As we get older it makes just gets harder to make change, we just collect stuff. And we go from being a kayak to being a battleship. And you know how the same goes turning a battleship around is, is is pretty difficult. versus going to kayak, you can flip the thing over and flip it back over or pull out of the water carried over your head. It’s a piece of cake, battleship, not so much. So how do you know how do you know if what you’re doing is gonna get you to where you want to go? Fundamentally, it’s I think it’s pretty simple. Just take a minute and take it to its logical conclusion. If I keep doing exactly the way that I’m like eating the food that I’m eating, what is what is this guaranteed to get me like keep interacting with money, the way that I’m interacting with money? What is it really guaranteed to get me? What’s the best case? What’s the worst case split it down the middle, it’s probably where you’re going to end up. So in the interest of not throwing the baby out with the bathwater and trying to change everything all at once. Because that is a recipe for just big change. reverting back backsliding, and we’re doing this yo yo thing, we’re losing weight, putting it back on, we’re getting out of debt, we’re getting back into it. Nobody wants that we want sustainable change, we want impactful change, we want transformational change. So what what is the simplest or the smallest change that we can make? It’s going to get us the biggest result. Think maybe that’s a good place to start. It’s a good thing to kind of kick around. Good thing to consider. I would just ask you that said, Hey, you, what’s the what’s the littlest thing you can do the smallest change that’s going to have the biggest impact on your life be like, Oh, my goodness, it’s a lot sort of unpacked, let’s get my brain around. I don’t know if I have a good answer to that question. And you’d be like most people, including me, because I don’t sit around thinking about this stuff all the time. So like everything else, I’d like to break things down. So I could sort of isolate the problem, instead of trying to get my arms all the way around that it’s difficult when we’re trying to pick up something that’s enormous that doesn’t even have any handles, how am I going to pick this thing up. But when I think about what’s the smallest thing I can do right now in my family life, that’s gonna give me the biggest result, I could get my arms around that I can figure that out. So six areas that I focus on, that encourage you to focus on as well. And these are the six areas that have focused on a goal setting. And that’s family, community wellbeing, career and financial, personal development, and then peace of mind. So really quick, fundamentally, what I encourage you to do is to ask yourself that question, what’s the smallest change that I can make? That’s gonna give me the biggest result in each of those six areas? And if you spent 30 minutes on this problem, so five minutes on each of them, I think that that would be that would just go so far. And helping you answer that question and help you get a little further along the road of let me figure out how it is that I want my life to look like. Because as you know, the only way to live how you want is to know how you want to live. We’ve never asked ourselves as questions. We don’t know the answer to it. So So those are the areas and I’ll just share with you some brief thoughts and maybe this will help you or from a family perspective, what’s a small change you can make right now. That will give you a massive room Word are a massive payoff. And I think that so much of happiness in life and so much frustration in life comes down to our expectations. And when those expectations are misaligned, when you are thinking one thing, and then your partner is thinking another, well, that’s obviously a recipe for miscommunication and miscommunication will lead to frustration and resentment and everything else. And then everything explodes and everything is ruined, and everything is lost and the earth explodes. Don’t want that. So, if you were to, if you were to set up or get with your partner and say, Okay, let’s let’s find a time once a week, where we can have a just a, a family meeting, or just coffee over on a Sunday morning, say, Okay, let’s let’s do an airing of grievances, like on Seinfeld, the Festivus party on Seinfeld, and say, Okay, what are the problems that we’re experiencing? What is What am I doing, that is pissing you off? What am I doing that is most irritating to you? Or what do I what am I doing that? If I stopped doing it, what behaviors if I changed them would would make you happy, would help us would help improve our relationship? So I think that that’s a really simple thing. And it’d be hard at first, for sure. Really hard at first, you get in the habit of it, I think that that is a small intervention right there that can just really pay dividends long term. from a community standpoint, what is the smallest change that you can make, that can have the biggest impact. And I think it’s just cleaning up. It’s cleaning up the messes cleaning up garbage, it’s pulling weeds. And one of my favorite quotes from Jack Kornfield, is that you need to attend to the parts of your garden that you can reach, and you can absolutely reach your own yard. So if you cleaned up your own yard, pulled the weeds, you made sure that everything was tidy, you landscaping look good, or your apartment complex. If every time you went outside, you picked up one piece of trash. Well, that would go such a long way. I think that Mike, Mike boys got me in this habit of every time we go to the park, we pick up a piece of garbage. And everybody did that. I’m not trying to be Pollyanna or anything like that. But that would go such a long way. Obviously, flipside of that is everybody if everybody loves to piece garbage on the ground everywhere? Well, place would be a total shithole. And nobody wants that at all. So there’s a simple little interview intervention, to be a leader, people will see you doing it, they’ll think, Oh, that’s a good idea. What if I did that. And now we’re really onto something. From a wellbeing perspective, this is a lot because there’s a lot that goes into well being I think about my physical health, I think about my mental health, I think about my emotional health. When I think about my physical health, I’m thinking about the food that I’m eating, and then the way that I’m moving my body. So a couple of simple things. If you cut snacking out one day a week, start there. I know that this is this played a huge role in my ability to lose weight, as a middle aged person, figure out why it gets really hard to lose weight, even if my diets really good. Still having a hard time getting this weight off, figured out once I stopped snacking. It’s not like I was eating bad food either. It’s just snacking, it’s extra calories. So if you’re trying to lose a little bit of weight, something like that, cut out snacking one day a week. I’m not saying it’s just stop doing it. Just all of it, just one day a week, stop snacking, that’ll give you something to build off of. If you’re not currently in the habit of exercising and move your body. Get out, take a walk 10 minutes in the morning, 10 minutes in the afternoon, or over your lunch break. Think that you’ll find that that is a huge, a simple intervention that will just pay huge dividends, it’s great to get outside, clear your head a little bit, get away from your technology. And obviously move your body your body wants you to be moving this whole idea of bookending your day, the more we can, there’s so much during our day that we don’t have control over like most of it. But we can control our routines, how we wake up and then how we go to bed. Talk about a masterpiece day. And that for me has been very, very helpful. So if you can try and wake up at the same time every day, try to go to bed the same time every day. I think that that is a simple intervention that will pay a huge dividend for you from a financial standpoint. Obviously I talk a lot about this but just get in the habit of reviewing your cash flow once a month. If you’re not paying attention to your finances, even if you are review like literally go through all your spending, all this all the places you spend money go through your internet banking accounts, your Amazon account, your credit card accounts, just track all of your spending all of your transactions, what gets measured gets managed. So you start paying attention to things that will create Lots of good things and help you to create more virtuous cycles as

opposed to vicious ones. So that would be what I would recommend on that piece is to just make sure that once a month you were you were reviewing all of your transactions. From personal development standpoint, there’s a lot that’s going on here. What I wrote down was stop worrying about stop worrying about what other people think that you should be doing and start doing what you want to be doing. And I don’t know if that’s really all that simple. Frankly, I think that that’s a pretty big thing. That’s something that sounds easy, but does really, really hard. So how about this, the more that we can become aware of what it is that we’re thinking, and we’re feeling, and how we’re letting external influences influence our behaviors, and our thoughts and our feelings, I think that that is a pretty simple thing. So start paying attention to the way that you’re feeling. And the thoughts that are going through your head, when you start thinking about that, when I talked about yesterday was was making the decision about how you want to think and feel about things. And so once you made the decision about how you want to be thinking and feeling about things that will then help you to start paying attention to what you are actually thinking and feeling about things. And then to change towards that thing that you want or the way that you want to be thinking and feeling about it. So from personal development standpoint, do that. Another one is simply to start reading five pages a day. So 10 pages is better, zero is worse, read five pages a day, you’ll be really glad you did that, if you can do it over the course of the year, develop lots of awesome habits. And then from a peace of mind standpoint, what can we do to have a greater sense or peace of mind, all of those things. And think that when you do all of those things, you will start feeling like you are on top of of your life. These are the six most important areas, six most important aspects of life, what I’ve discovered, and when you are paying attention to them, you are working to improve them that will for good reason, help you to feel like you’re on top of it. So again, my my recommendation is to take 30 minutes, and just spend five minutes thinking about what’s the smallest change that I can make that can have the biggest result to pay the biggest dividend for my family, my community, my well being my career and financial situation, my personal development and peace of mind. And the answer to the question is what’s the smallest thing that you can do, it’s going to have the biggest result, it’s cycles. Boring, you already know that. But you haven’t done it. Least I know that I hadn’t done it. So if you haven’t done that yet, do it for goodness sakes. And that will literally be the biggest thing that you can do the smallest thing that you can do that have the biggest payoff. So as always, you can access our free goals course money alignment, academy.com, go to the courses, goals course click that you can access for free, you can also access our values course for free, and you can access our debt. If you happen to be in credit card debt sucks, get out of it, do everything you can and take advantage of that. And every one of these things, it’ll feed off of the other thing, it’ll help you benefit. So these small little changes you’re making over time will result in massive changes to your benefit. And that’s what I want for you. You are worthy of and deserving of having a great life but you’re not entitled to it. So you got to get the work done. So do the work. As always, do your part. Doing your best

Transcribed by https://otter.ai