Living Skillfully: Your Mind and Health

Here is my seven-question system for writing your personal change plan. I hope it gives you motivation and inspiration for your own personal growth and development.

1. What is it that you want to be different when you have made your change?

You need to define success, specify your target, or you won’t know when you’ve hit it.

photo credit: Q4RadioGuy

Decide how you are going to measure and track your progress as part of this step. Tracking progress is motivational.

There are several good tracking tools around. Prevention has one among their health trackers called My Custom Measurements which lets you track whatever you like. Joe’s Goals is also widely recommended as a simple yet functional online goal tracker.

2. What is your current situation?

This is your starting point. Don’t skip over this step. A hard look at your current situation is an important component of changing it. If you don’t know where you are, you’re not ready to move.

Take your time and figure it out thoroughly. Run the numbers, if there are numbers (like I did for my weight gain goal).

Write it down.

3. What is the major benefit of the change?

This is what you will keep in front of you to motivate you through the change. You wouldn’t be setting out to change if your current situation was fine and the new situation offered nothing better.

Identify the benefit, and write it up somewhere where you’ll see it. Add pictures if possible. Carry around a card in your pocket. Pull it out and look at it. Recite it as a mantra to yourself. In other words, pay attention to it and keep it in the forefront of your awareness.

4. What are you already doing now that you can use to your advantage?

You have positive habits that you use every day to keep your life functioning. You have a routine, and you can tie your desired changes to that routine so that you’re regularly reminded.

5. What other resources do you have?

As an adult human being, you solve problems all the time. You have problem-solving skills, you have creativity. You have skills and experience and knowledge and friends and, if you’re reading this, internet access, which means you have access to more knowledge and more knowledgeable people than anyone ever had in any previous generation. You have economic resources.

How are you going to use all that?

6. What is hindering you from making the change?

Since you haven’t made the change already, something must have been stopping you. Was it lack of knowledge? Lack of motivation? Lack of resources? Lack of opportunity? Something present in your life that was actively preventing the change?

Identify as many obstacles as possible and figure out how you’re going to deal with them.

photo credit: Daquella manera

If part of the problem is that you have resistance to the change, you need to confront that. You don’t need to understand why the resistance is occurring in order to overcome it, but you do need to acknowledge it and do some subconscious work in order to dissipate it. I recommend using my self-hypnosis starter script or a similar resource to put your subconscious mind into a space where it’s open to change.

7. What are you prepared to do in order to make this change?

Having answered the other questions, you should now have a good grasp of the benefits and also the costs of making the change.

Do the benefits outweigh the costs?

So there you are – a personal change plan outline. Hopefully I have removed at least one excuse which is keeping you from changing!

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