The 3 Ingredients That Make Any Life Change Achievable

Making the changes that will help us achieve a more balanced life often seems like a gamble – sometimes they stick and sometimes they don’t.

But is there a way to make sure that they’ll stick every time?

The answer is Yes, and No.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to make life changes so easy that they ALWAYS work the FIRST time.

But there IS a way to make sure they always stick EVENTUALLY and it requires these 3 essential ingredients.
1. Compassion

Really? Why would this be the first ingredient?

The reason is that most of what you fear about failing is actually your fear of how hard you’ll be on yourself and all the negative things you’ll say that it means about you if you fail.

Then the need to avoid all that judgment places enormous inner pressure on you to succeed. And pressure ALWAYS makes any goal harder to achieve.

Compassion is a response that says “It’s OK. I’m here. I understand.” And it’s something you can give to yourself, not just others.

Compassion accepts whatever is true in this moment and allows it to just “be”, so you can move forward from it.

Compassion doesn’t need to judge or blame or shame you because it knows that all your outcomes are OK, just as they are. And so are you.

When you can look forward to a compassionate response from yourself even if you fail, it takes ALL the pressure off and makes it so much easier to try making the changes you want.
2. Permission to Fail

In my last guest post here, I talked about how important it is to allow yourself the time to keep working at it when you’re trying to change your habits.

This is because, when you introduce anything new in your life, whether its a new eating habit or bedtime or a less hectic schedule, your brain needs time to build new pathways and neurons around it.

So even if you fail over and over again, you’re still building these new pathways in your brain and eventually the change will start to feel natural.

The problem is – most of us don’t give ourselves permission to fail this many times at something without just giving up.

Instead, we make up a story about what a failure we are or how we’ll never be able to do this and we stop trying. (That’s why compassion is the first ingredient!)

So giving yourself permission to fail before you even start gives your brain time to build new pathways and keeps you from ending up in a hurtful story that will only keep you stuck.
3. Willingness to Try Again

As you might guess, this is the ingredient that makes it possible to achieve almost any change, because it simply means that you won’t give up.

And persistence virtually guarantees success!

Many of us approach life changes with our WILL or the sense that we’ll force a positive outcome or muscle our way to the result we want.

Willingness has a very different feeling to it.

Its almost a kind of surrender.

Willingness is like saying “I know I’m not in control of every part of this path, and I know things might not be going the way I wanted, but I’m willing to keep trying anyway.”

Willingness can also help you tap into your deeper reason for seeking change in your life and what it will truly mean to you to achieve it.

In order to be willing, even AFTER you’ve already failed, you’ll need a reason to try again and that reason is your fuel to keep going.

These 3 things together – compassion, permission to fail and willingness to try again – create a pathway to change that’s less stressful, more open, more encouraging and a lot easier on you.

I’d love to hear YOUR thoughts on these ingredients and how you’ve experienced the process of creating positive change. Join the discussion in the comments below.

Posted in: By Zainab Malik