Worldwide Success

In the article Unconventional Advice to Help You Reach Your Goals, we discussed how studies at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston suggested that changing all your bad habits at once is more effective than changing your behavior one step at a time.  In this article we will expand on this topic and review the power of making big, bold changes, all at once.

Change is hard.  We all know that.  Therefore, it seems logical that in order to be effective in making changes in your habits you should take small steps towards the desired behavior.  The rationale behind this way of thinking is that if you take small steps you will break down the barriers into smaller, more manageable chunks, making it easier to absorb the impact of change.

Despite the seemingly logical approach to taking several sequential small steps, in many cases this approach is very ineffective.  This is due to the fact that small changes lead to small results, and small results are not very motivating.  When it comes to change, the motivation to initiate it and stick to it is one of the most important factors to success. 

To simply put it, small changes that lead to small results are not very exciting.  Big, bold, audacious changes are exciting.  And it’s the excitement that will get you motivated to make the change.  Besides, the biggest barrier to change is the anxiety and fear of the change, not the change itself.  So if you make the change one step at a time, you are extending the pain, like in Chinese torture.  But if you take all the changes at once you will realize that the changes were not as bad as you once imagined, and now the fear and anxiety is gone because you don’t have any more changes to deal with in the future in order to achieve you desired state.

Let’s look at an example.  Suppose you are trying to improve your health and fitness and you decide to change your habits.  Let’s say in order to reach the health and fitness levels you are looking for you decide to do the following:

• Stop eating fast food
• Exercise regularly
• Eat more fruits and vegetables
• Reduce alcohol consumption
• Reduce the size of your portions
• Get at least 8 hours of sleep per night

If you decide to take one these changes at a time, before you attempt to take the next one, you probably will not feel or see very significant results in the short-term.  But if you make all these changes at once, the impact will be significant enough to make you feel and see a difference, and that will lead to success because you will be excited and motivated by the changes.

The fact that these changes should be big, audacious, and done simultaneously does not mean you should do something unreasonable or unsafe.  We are not taking about running a marathon if you have never run around the block before.  We are not talking about starving to death in order to lose weight.  We are talking about changing your approach from serial to parallel.  We are talking about approaching the change from multiple angles and hitting them all at once.

At first you may be concerned about you ability to take on so many changes in one shot.  But the best way to experience the power of changing all your habits at once is to try it.  The next time you want to make some significant change in your life, try this:

• Brainstorm all the things you can do bring you closer to your desired state
• Don’t limit yourself to the obvious and try a few bold, audacious ideas 
• Write down the complete list of ideas from the exercise above
• Go cold turkey and do all of them at once

This approach may make you feel uncomfortable at first, but once you start seeing the results, you will be hooked.  Start making bid, bold, audacious changes, all at once, and you will be amazed at your rate of success.

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