Editor’s note: This article was first published in December 2016; it was published in late December 2016, and next year refers to 2017.
You may feel that your life has turned into a constant daily routine that stopped rewarding you long ago. You may think you have hit a ceiling and that this is how your life will be from now on. Or you may have accepted that, even though you think your life is crap, that’s just the way it is and it can’t be changed.
Whatever stage you are at, you are on the path to enduring life instead of living it. However much you settle for things, deep down you know that you need to turn your life around completely, or at least you know that it’s what you would like. And perhaps you don’t do it because change brings fears, or simply because you think you wouldn’t be capable of it.
“Turning your life around requires big changes”
That idea isn’t entirely right, because you only need to take a few steps, but take them consistently. Every 1,000-kilometre journey begins with the first few metres. And those first steps, as the saying goes, don’t take you straight to where you want to go, but they do start taking you out of the place you want to leave.
How to change your life radically
(See also: How to succeed when you don’t have any special talent)
1. Take time out to think
When you don’t know what to do, the best thing is to do nothing. Just think, and analyse in detail what you want to achieve, what you want to change in your life, where you want to go…
Above all, stop wasting energy on complaining and constantly repeating what you don’t like, and start focusing on what you want to achieve.
You need an end, a purpose, a goal in mind, so that you can then make the decision and commit to doing whatever it takes to bring about the change you want to experience. I know I’m going to repeat myself here, but if you keep doing what you have done so far, you won’t get different results. Nothing changes unless you make it change.
2. Who adds to your life and who subtracts from it
Among the people you surround yourself with, who gives you something, who helps you grow personally or professionally? And on the other hand, who are the people who only distract you from your goal and drain your time and energy? Get rid of every toxic person around you, or limit your exposure to them as much as you can.
3. Is your case special? Is your crossroads different?
This kind of thinking is very common: most people hide behind the idea that their situation is more complicated than that of others who managed to get out of it. And that is false. Your case is no different; it is practically the same as the ones other people have already overcome, whatever it may be. So it is solved in exactly the same way: identify where you want to get out of, identify where you want to go, and draw up your exit plan.
How do you deal with a crossroads?
We have all been through, or will go through, some very difficult moment in life. We will all find ourselves staring a problem in the face: some people will turn their backs on it, and the problem will follow them all their lives. Others will face it.
When we reach a crossroads in life, we can face it, or we can sink and run away. Facing a situation doesn’t necessarily mean you will win, but if anything is common sense, it is that you can’t overcome something you never face.
Every decision you make in life has consequences, both the decisions you make and the ones you never make. And the ones you never make tend to be disastrous for your happiness.
4. Cut things out of your life
Start getting rid of the things associated with the life you would like to change. Sometimes those things include people.
(See: The importance of the people you surround yourself with, as you’ve never had it explained)
5. Focus your energy on what you can control
Most of the things that worry most people are things beyond our control. Depression comes from a burden of the past, and stress from a burden of uncertainty about the future. Both states of mind are very harmful because they are beyond our control. We don’t know what the future will be like, and we can no longer change the past.
Where we can focus our energy is on what we are going to do today to improve our lives. That is where we should put our focus, because today is within our control.
Instead of focusing your energy on what you don’t have and would like to have, focus on what you do have and how you are going to use it to get what you want.
6. Start small, but think big
Whether we are talking about business or about changing a habit in our lives, the advice is the same. If you want to lose 30 kilos, don’t focus on the figure of 30, because you will get frustrated. Think about losing 1 kilo, then another.
If you want to become an entrepreneur, start with the means you have at hand, so that you build healthy organic growth and test whether your business idea works properly before putting all your assets into it.
7. Change the way you think
Every important change, like achieving anything worthwhile, is rarely quick and easy. You need to be prepared to face all kinds of obstacles and setbacks that will come up along the road to change. Those setbacks and obstacles can’t be allowed to make us give up on our purpose, or all the previous effort will have been wasted.
If you are going to change your life radically, it won’t be easy, and you need to know that. But it will be worth it once you get there.
That said, no important change has ever been achieved from inside the comfort zone. You have to get out of it to succeed. And you need to be very clear about that too.
8. Speed up your learning and find a shortcut
They say there are no shortcuts to success, but the truth is that there are. One of the best shortcuts to success is to bring into your circle either a mentor or people who have done what you want to do. Or who are already there.
In other words, if you want to be a business owner, surround yourself with business owners. If you want to learn about app development, spend more time with the people who work in that world. There are people who, from where they stand, can already save you from making a lot of mistakes.
But above all, whatever it is, you are going to have to learn. Don’t think you are going to achieve in three days, without learning anything, what took others 10 years of learning every day. Don’t be that motivated fool whose motivation, riding on the wagon of ignorance, crashes into the first wall it meets along the way.
And if you are one of those people who set New Year’s resolutions, here you go: 6 reasons you don’t keep your New Year’s resolutions
Featured image: Tangopaso, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
