Lockdown Side Effects, Not Only Daily Routines But The Ever So Important Family Gatherings. What We Can Do About It!

Part 3

The concept of choosing smaller goals to work on is one of the secrets to any success.  Another is ignoring the setbacks and simply use them to re-commit to yourself that you will achieve your goals regardless of what gets in your way.

One trick I used many years ago to change some of my bad habits was to pause when I was about to cheat on myself and do the thing I swore earlier that I would not do and ask myself this question:

Tomorrow, when I look back on this moment will I regret not keeping my promises to myself more than I would regret not doing the thing I said I would not do?

I came up with that little game after dozens of personal failures.  I simply got tired of beating myself up for violating my personal integrity and not living up to the higher standards that I wanted to have in my life.  That switch of holding myself accountable to myself has been a personal success tool that has helped me accomplish many of the things that I enjoy about my life today.

The next thing I realized was; to achieve my goals I had to start ignoring the well-meaning advice of others and simply do what I knew I needed to do.  This came about once I realized that much of the advice I was getting from others was really pointing out all of the difficulties I was sure to experience, all of the road blocks I was going to run into and all kinds of problems that I was going to have if I continued down that path I set for myself.

I learned that if I set my smaller goals small enough, I could simply make the changes on my own and most people never even noticed the difference in my behavior.  And if someone asked why I was not drinking my usual coke with a little ice I would simply say that I was not in the mood for it today, or that I already had a lot of sugar today or something simple like that.

Take a look for yourself and see what you are willing to change in your current situation that will help to increase your personal control over your “new normal”.  What can you do today to help increase your quality of life not just for today but for the decades to come?

Check back on December 30 for part 4 of this discussion…