Success – Four Weeks at a Time

Today is more of a tip, a simple piece of advice, than a lengthy discussion or exploration. Something I’ve learned along the way which you may find helpful.

One of the biggest mental hurdles for many people on the road to self-improvement is getting their head around the notion of life-long behavioural change. Life; it’s kind of a long time isn’t it? Never to be the same again. Ever. Getting our head around the ‘forever’ thing can be a little daunting, especially when we feel like we’re a million miles from where we wanna be. Sometimes the thought of changing certain behaviours, habits and attitudes for the rest of our life, can seem completely overwhelming, impractical and unrealistic. Terrifying even.

The Truth…

The sad truth is that many people achieve a certain level of success only to ‘undo’ their good work within a year or less. When I say many, I really mean the vast majority. You know what and who I mean. Just take a look around you. Or a look in the mirror. Most people who lose weight regain it, most people who ‘give up’ certain things, take them up again, and many people seem to alternate between lounge lizard and athlete, in some kind of weird annual ritual of frustration. In fact, many people will spend the majority of their life on a perpetual cycle of starting and stopping a range of programs, diets, fitness kicks and short-term healthy endeavors. Almost changing on a regular basis, but never actually doing it. We all want the ‘different forever’ thing, but statistically very few people create it. Not because they can’t, just because they won’t.

So the questions that need to be asked are:

1. What approach is most likely to lead to forever results?

2. What is least likely to be effective?

3. Where do most people stumble?

4. When we take an objective, analytical, scientific glimpse at the various approaches (to change) and the results they produce, what do we discover?

What We Know…

We know that extreme rarely works but so many people continue to use the extreme approach anyway. Trying to create drastic change in a short amount of time (rapid weight loss diets, get-rich-quick-schemes) almost never results in life-long transformation. In fact, it invariably results in frustration and disappointment. The notion of trying to ‘undo’ decades of destructive behaviours and bad habits in a matter of weeks is stupid, but still we try. The quick-fix generation, with the quick-fix mentality mostly fixes nothing.

What About Emotion?

We also know that when it comes to creating forever results, logic, planning and strategy are infinitely more effective than emotion. Emotion is great to get us started and it’s good to keep us proactive for a day or two, but beyond that we may need a plan. We need an approach which keeps us doing what we need to do, irrespective of our emotional state on a given day. Decisions often come out of emotion (which is okay), but that emotion needs to be harnessed to a logical, practical change strategy for it to result in anything worthwhile or permanent.

We know that motivation is a temporary state and therefore we need to be able to maintain focus, consistency and momentum even when the feeling of motivation is absent. This is where most people fail. They have an initial burst of enthusiasm and motivation, they change their behaviours (for a minute or two) and then when the motivation (excitement) wears off (which it will), so too do the behaviours. Back to square one. Again. And again. And the cycle continues.

Four Week Blocks.

While it’s important that we have medium and long-term goals, the reality is that we live in the present. Here and now. We don’t live in the future, so we often find it hard to get our thinking in tune with the changing for the rest of our life concept.

Working with thousands of people has taught me that focusing on ‘the next thirty years’ (solely) is for many of us, more debilitating than it is empowering. So while we have a big picture plan and some long term goals, it’s actually more beneficial to invest the majority of our focus and energy into short-term installments, specifically, four week blocks, which in turn lead to long-term change.

With my clients I have discovered the ‘four week’ approach to be the most successful strategy in helping them re-invent themselves and create results over the long term. The irony being that by not focusing on forever we are more likely to create forever results. Clever huh? What I love about working with people in smaller installments is that the time frame is short enough to stay mentally focused and emotionally committed (crucial), but also long enough to actually see some real results (crucial). And when we see those results we also see a new peak in excitement, enthusiasm and momentum.

Forever Results

At the end of each four week period, we assess the progress, we high-five, we talk, we set some new goals for the next block and off we go again. My experience is that people love working this way because it’s measurable, practical, realistic and it works. We simply break the big process down into manageable installments. While we have the big picture floating somewhere in our subconscious, my clients invest all of their energy into our four week short-term project. Within twelve months, we have usually changed habits and thinking for a lifetime.

Forever results without focusing on forever.

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