#51: If You Change Nothing, Nothing Will Change

Welcome back! This is the first of a 24-episode contract beginning in 2022. I've already recorded an interview with Kyle Hagge and have a couple more scheduled. Between those and some solo episodes, there's a lot of content that I'm very excited about that's coming.

This podcast is built around the idea of Live By Design. This is a concept that says you have responsibility and ownership of your life. That your actions have consequences and you can make your own decisions with agency. To go along with that is the idea of this: If you change nothing, nothing will change. It’s January 5th, the beginning of a new year, 2022. Around this time, there’s been lots of talk about resolutions, and if you don’t change anything about your life, nothing about your life will change.

But I want to add to that: If you change everything, nothing will change.

Life isn’t about radical shifts and transitions. It’s not about flipping a switch and being a new person. There’s really something to the new year, and it signifies a new beginning in your life, and in mine. But realistically. If you’re like me, you often try to make sweeping changes to your life in short bursts. You say things like, “This month, I’ll change XYZ and ABC.” You might even write out your new habits and put them in your calendar and schedule them in, so you know you’ll follow through with it.

When we try to make sweeping, broad changes like this, we often cannot make them. We can’t follow through. Life doesn’t work that way.

The right answer for new years’ resolutions and for goal-setting and growth in general is a middle-ground. It’s not about changing nothing, (if you change nothing, nothing will change), but it’s also not about changing everything (if you change everything, nothing will change.) Instead, it’s about taking consistent actions. One day after the another, each step before the next.

Repeated, consistent actions are the big things in our lives. People that are great writers got that way not by taking one course or reading one book. They got that way by writing a lot of words every day for a long time. Repeated, consistent action.

People who are fit didn’t do it on a crash diet and going to the gym in January. They did it by building habits and consistent actions of eating healthier, sleeping better, and exercising consistently for a long time.

Our lives can change. You are capable of change. That’s a core tenet of the Live By Design idea.

But to make a lasting change means you have to change in small ways, consistently. Over long periods of time, these small changes become the big changes.

And I hope today is the day you start with those small changes.

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