So, you’re convinced that making a simple change in your behavior or habits will bring you significant benefits. It should be a no-brainer. After all, you’re perfectly capable of doing the thing you’ve decided you should do. So, it only makes sense that you’d just go ahead and do that thing and just keep on doing it. Right?
But more often than not, that’s not what happens. You may start out with a bang, but then you fizzle out long before the job is done. Sadly, your good intention gets lost in the shuffle and ends up doing you no good at all.
It’s maddening when you know that there’s a particular thing you could do to make things better but you just don’t do it – not because you don’t honestly intend to do it, and not because it’s beyond your ability to do it, but because, well, you just don’t do it.
So, why is self-improvement so hard?
Making improvements in your own behavior and habits isn’t at all like doing a home improvement project. If you knock down a wall in your living room to open things up, the wall will be gone for good and won’t come back on its own. Not so if you decide to remodel yourself by, say, adopting a more positive attitude or just improving your posture. That’s because your behavior, in a sense, WANTS to stay the way it is.
Your behavior, in other words, actively resists efforts to change it. It’s like a rubber band that you can deliberately stretch, but if you let go of it for even a split second, it will happily return to the way it was.
Know what you’re in store for
My advice: Never start another self-improvement project without first acknowledging that you’re in for a fight. It’s a fight you can win only by deliberately using the kind of effective follow through strategies you can learn about in the Follow Through Master Program.