Choosing to change

I’ve worked with business coaches to help me grow my business, life coaches to help me get out of my own way, diet gurus to help with meal planning and trainers to help me with my fitness. I’ve attended untold number of seminars and workshops on growing my business. And after all this, it feels that little has changed.

It’s not like I haven’t made any progress. It’s just that I’m not where I want to be or think I should be by now. I haven’t made the big, bold, in-your-face changes that would propel me to the next level.

You know, I thought I was good at change. Really, what’s the big deal? After all, I moved 2500 miles away from the people and places I knew to a place where I didn’t know a soul. I put myself into a situation where I had to make my business work because there was little to no opportunity for full-time employment. And I did it easily (at least that’s how I remember it!). So change is easy, right?

That kind of change – what I think of as external change – is easy for me. The internal stuff – not so much. It’s difficult and scary. And I resist it!

Or maybe it’s not so much that I resist – although resistance is definitely part of it. Maybe because it’s internal and I can’t see it, it’s not real to me. It’s intangible. And it’s not immediate. It’s not a one-and-done sort of thing.

And maybe the immediacy of it is the biggest factor. So many of us are looking for the quick fix. And yet, in most cases, the quick fix simply doesn’t exist. It takes hard work and commitment and patience because it can be a long, slow path to change.

And because it’s long and slow, many of us give up before we get there. We start something, and when we don’t see the results we want when we want, we give up on it and move on to the next quick fix.

Jumping from quick fix to quick fix gets us nowhere.

Let’s appreciate the steps we take each day, no matter how small they may seem. Over time they add up, and one day we can look back and see just how far we’ve come.

I am making the choice to give the small steps a chance to work for me over the long run. How about you?