Adam Smith from A-Game Consultancy and Hospitality Wellness brings us the second instalment of Mindset Mondays - the five key steps to making lasting change in your life.
I firstly want to wish you all well for this week. It’s been a tough period and though some of you have been working in some guise throughout the pandemic there’s a large number who are behind the bar for the first time in six months or more. But either way, make sure you all do what you do best and smash it!
Last week I touched on the importance of building momentum instead of relying on motivation. This week I’m going to be focusing on what I believe are the five key steps to making lasting change in your life.
Five stages of making lasting change
1. Painful awareness
You must be painfully aware that there is a problem or you won't actually take the first steps towards making a change. For example, your button flying off your jeans after recent weight gain, your partner threatening to leave you unless you change a certain behaviour or getting out of breath after running for a few minutes. Until you’ve had enough pain, you won’t do anything about it even if you’re miserable with your current habits.
2. Make a decision
After you become aware there's a problem, you must then decide to make a change. The decision is a crucial part of your journey to achieving your goals. Just being aware of it won’t actually achieve anything - the next phase is the decision. However, we’ve all made the big decisions in the past with no follow through. Most of us have said at one point or another “the diet starts tomorrow” or “New Year new me”, which is why stage 3 is so important.
3. Strategy
We’ve all heard of the phrase, practice makes perfect. Practice actually makes permanent and also, practice doesn't make perfect if you're doing it wrong the whole time. It's an integral part of making progress otherwise you'll lose focus and become overwhelmed. Having a clear plan in place will get you a lot closer to achieving your goals.
4. Accountability
This next phase is to enlist help from a friend, family member, colleague, spouse or a coach/mentor. Being accountable to someone will drastically improve your chances of seeing results quickly. They will also be there once your momentum subsides. The easiest person to lie to is yourself, however, in another sense, the only person you can’t lie to is also yourself. So by having someone to be accountable to will help you stay on track.
5. Take action
This is by far the most important point. Action beats knowledge every day of the week and without action there is simply no change. You either win or you learn, so take action and learn those lessons on your journey to success.