Step NINE to Create a Life You Love: Making Adjustments to the Change Process Through Self-Reflection

“But there is a corollary to freedom and that's personal responsibility, and the real challenge is how you generate that personal responsibility without imposing it.” —Esther Dyson

Step 9 to creating a life that you love is about understanding how new learning can be integrated throughout your personal change process and how you can apply it to all areas of your life. Most likely you will need to make adjustments, and these will be based on constant self-reflection. Fine tuning your change process by taking personal responsibility for your life is a big part of this step. You continue to deepen your self-reflection and self-awareness in order to stay motivated and connected to your vision. This process ensures that you continue to feel good about the person you are growing into on a daily basis. You will also give yourself space to celebrate all of the shifts and changes you have created up to this point in the process.

As humans we are driven by and respond to rewards. Rewarding, celebrating and staying focused on what is going well throughout your change process helps to create this subtle shift in growing in the direction of who you want to be and how you want to live. As you celebrate and apply your new learning it is helpful to share those insights and skills with others. When you share with others you solidify and strengthen what you have learned. This sharing process makes it more real, more solid and more grounded within you.

Taking personal responsibility for your life is closing the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it. As you have formed new habits, focused on what’s going well and accessed your support team as needed, living within the ability to make choices based on your vision is essential. This demonstrates the ability to take personal responsibility for your life. This is where many people get stuck. They struggle to keep going, to stick with the practices that work once they feel good and complacency can start to creep in… complacency can destroy your vision.

When you take personal responsibility for your life, you essentially ask yourself before each choice, decision and undertaking you make, “does this choice support my vision?” If the answer is no, then is it worth it? Ultimately, you have to decide this, often multiple times a day. This is where reviewing and staying true to the process of change is essential. The thing is, you don’t just go through the steps once and create a life you love. You have to review, redo and keep moving forward by taking personal responsibility for your life every single day. When things go awry it’s easy to look outside yourself for where to place the blame. This is not taking personal responsibility. When you can look within and reflect on your own blind spots, your shadow and patterns, you have the ability to continue to fine-tune them. 

While self-awareness is the heart of step 1, it’s necessary throughout each and every step to build on your self-awareness through constant self-reflection. This is how you can make the necessary adjustments. One way to do this is through integrating rewards and celebrating what is going well. Step 9 is really about constantly reintegrating all of the previous steps so that you don’t find yourself in a state of complacency, that where you’ve made it to is good enough even though your vision is much greater. In step 9 you remind yourself not to settle, to keep moving towards what you want and remaining aligned with why you want it.

When you engage in regular self-reflection, make the necessary adjustments and celebrate your wins, you will find yourself closer to living in alignment with your vision. When you take personal responsibility for your life, stay in alignment with your greater vision and reward yourself for your shifts no matter how small, you will find yourself creating a life that you love.

Step SEVEN to Creating a Life You Love: Moving Forward & Creating True Self-Leadership

“Becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself. It is precisely that simple and it is also that difficult.” -Warren Bennis

Step 7 of the 10 steps to create a life you love is about creating a deeper understanding of how to continue to lead yourself through the change process at a steady, manageable pace. This step offers opportunities to evaluate and adjust your plan as needed, to continue to forge through any residual resistance and personalize your change process. Witnessing the transition from planning and following action steps into internalized habits is a primary focus of this step. Understanding leadership skills and becoming a strong leader for yourself is emphasized—so that you can maintain the progress you’ve made and feel the impact of the new habits you’re creating. We are often used to either being led or leading others, however, leading yourself is where your true internal power lies.

With the earlier steps all about reflection, awareness, creation and action, this step is more about witnessing and making choices. Here you will witness your progress, the new action steps that are turning into behaviors and transforming into habits. The integration of these new habits sparks a need to witness these changes and continue to look inward at your change process in order to feel as though you are leading yourself. When an action step was first created as a part of the goal that supported your vision, you had to really plan, work at it, convince yourself, deal with resistance and build resilience. Once all of that hard work is done, the action step turns into a behavior and then into a habit. Once this new habit is formed, it becomes automatic.

When you no longer have to work at it or try really hard or force yourself to do this action step, you know that you’ve integrated this behavior as a habit. When you keep your pace steady, it is more likely to deeply integrate and you can experience how automatic it feels. When working in my practice, one of the first areas that many people struggle with when it comes to emotional eating is fear that they won’t be able to eat what they want to eat. They fear that they will have to give up the foods that brings them pleasure. They recognize the struggle, but fear the change. If the vision is having a healthy relationship with food, we break it down and start with goals.

One example of goal, would be to get adequate nourishment. No matter what else they choose to put in their mouths, start with increasing vegetable intake, preferably leafy greens by one serving per day. This change is often met with resistance, they bought it but it went bad, they don’t know how to prepare it, they don’t like it… Once we work through the resistance and find tasty recipes and the vegetables that they find satisfying, they have to work at it. They have to create plans for when they are going to eat their leafy greens. They have to do some preparation to ensure they eat it and keep a log to ensure this happens. Then they notice changes they are experiencing within their bodies such as improved digestion, more energy, or feeling inspired to make other healthy choices. Through this evaluation they feel empowered and also notice certain general food cravings diminishing. Then one day it happens, they just do it. It becomes part of the routine, part of meal prepping, part of what they purchase at the store. Eating a leafy green every day has become a habit.

Once increased nourishment has integrated in this automatic way, we celebrate! The steady pace, practice and ultimate change happens and then they are leading themselves. They are making the choices, doing the inner focus and making decisions based on what they know their body needs to feel nourished and healthy and this translates to feeling strong, empowered and hopeful. While this small change does not heal emotional eating, it does create a shift, it is a step towards self-leadership and healthy habit forming that they desire, yet initially feared. When you break down change into doable, actionable steps, the change happens over time and it feels really good.

Here are some primary leadership skills and how to apply them to self-leadership as you continue to assess your progress and move forward:

Communication: how you talk to yourself is important, it is essential to be kind in your self-talk and focus on your strengths.

Motivation: giving yourself a reason to do the work and finding what inspires you to do is vital.

Be positive: giving yourself reasons to move forward with a positive and healthy mindset.

Being creative: finding solutions to tricky problems, (like charring broccoli and using a delicious sauce and making it taste AMAZING rather than mushy steamed broccoli) is extremely useful.

Giving feedback: doing this in a diplomatic way is essential as a leader, so being able to get real with yourself, or access the support person who will!

Responsibility: this is where you close the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it.

When you lead yourself to the next place to begin and how to get there, you open yourself to these powerful shifts and new automatic habits that are healthy and desirable. When you rush, force or use punishment and deprivation as a strategy for change, you most likely won’t get very far. When you lead yourself with focus, determination and access any helpful support, you open yourself to living a life that you love.

Progress, NOT Perfection

Do you feel ready to make BIG changes in your life and yet you are waiting for the *perfect* time to implement those changes? Perfectionism is a plague. The need to feel, be or wait until everything is *perfect* only ends up creating excuse after excuse after excuse. If you really think that there will ever be the perfect timing, circumstances, or anything else to start along your personal wellness journey, no matter what your goals, hopes and dreams may be, then you will find that you will never make it happen. 

Perfectionism is loaded with fear. It is loaded with negative self-talk and feels safest and most in control when it is ruminating on the fantasy of change rather than on allowing yourself to take imperfect action towards change. Change is a process and requires many steps. The change process involves your emotions, mindset and an ability to shift your perceptions about what you want. Having a BIG vision is helpful, but when it comes to putting the change you want into action, it is most helpful to start with small, doable steps. When you consistently place your focus, effort and mindset into completing these small steps, you inevitably will create progress.

Perfectionism will tell you lies such as, “you will begin your personal wellness journey or work on your vision and goals after the trip, the wedding, the weekend, this or that holiday…” only to have something else that will trip up your ability to be *perfect* only causing a constant delay of just starting. It is imperative to change your mindset, change your focus and change your perspective to one of “try, one of today is the day, to one of imperfect action is still action.”

Here’s the cool thing about taking imperfect action, even if the outcome isn’t exactly what you want, there is still outcome. Even if your goal is not at 100% by your desired timeline, it’s way more likely to be some % closer than if you were waiting around for just the right time to begin. Let’s say your goal is to eat 7-10 vegetables and fruits per day or to exercise for 30 minutes 3-5 days/ week or to take a yoga class 2 x’s a week. Let’s say you reach the goal 60-80% of the time each week, how would that feel? How would it feel in comparison to not setting the goal, to not create and move towards your action plan and still be waiting for the *perfect* circumstances to begin your personal wellness journey? Yeah, that’s right, not so great! Whereas 60-80% is pretty great given that change is hard and life is busy and constantly distracting.

Let your new mantra become, TRY. Let your mantra be: what ONE thing can I do today to help move me in the direction of my goal? Let you mantra be: I can do it, I will do it, I have to do it no matter what. Today is the day to start. Today is the day to take any action, no matter how small. Today is the day to set out on the journey towards the change you want. Start with your vision, then set your goals, then create your actions steps, then create a plan and then do one thing every single day that moves you in the direction of the life that you want to live. I know sounds simple, but it’s definitely not easy. Perfectionism does not just go away without a fight… This process requires daily focus, review and action. This process requires dedication and pushing through many difficult emotions, thoughts and fears.

Motivation can be hard to come by so having a determined mindset is where you begin. Your journey is yours. It does not have to be *perfect*. If you are suffering from perfectionism, ask yourself why. What happened in your life that made you feel as though being *perfect* was the only way? Ask yourself what messages you received about being *perfect* that have led to feeling stuck, stagnant and the inaction that is happening in your life at this time as a result. Please be kind to yourself. Remind yourself that your perfectionism is not useful. When you try, even not knowing what the exact outcome will be, know that it will feel awkward and uncomfortable in the beginning. The concept of being *perfect* at all is a myth. No one is perfect. Offer yourself a moment to acknowledge this and then decide what imperfect action you will take TODAY! Let me know what action you do take and how it feels, I’d love to hear from you!