In my blog last month, I wrote about how 40% of happiness is determined by our actions, attitude and what we do on a daily basis. A whole 40% you are free to use to make changes to your life, changes that will make you happy and increase your chances of being successful in finding a job you love.
BUT…
What happens if you are struggling to make these changes?
Have you found yourself wanting to make a change that you think will make you happy, but it just never seems to happen?
You promise yourself that you will do something to improve your well-being or introduce a positive change into your life, but struggle to keep the promises you make to yourself. You want to change a habit but find it impossible to do so and end up postponing the change.
“I will go for a run tomorrow.” “I will sort my career in the New Year.” “I will make time for daily mindfulness when I am less busy.”
These promises to ourselves are really hard to keep, aren’t they? It is much easier to find a reason not to do it.
“Work is too busy”, “the weather was bad”, “I didn’t feel like it”, “I didn’t think I would be able to do it.”
However, all these reasons become our negative habits, the habits that don’t make us happy. They are hard to change because they have become an established part of our life.
It actually takes 20-30 days of introducing a new habit, to break the old one but it is possible to change them, it may just take a little bit of time to do so.
How can you make the changes you want to make?
- Believe you can do it – saying ‘I can’t do it’ will make you feel miserable and you will end up not doing it. Believe in yourself and believe you can do it. This will make you feel happier and give you the motivation to achieve it.
- Smile – I want you to frown right now for 10 seconds. Now smile for 10 seconds. Which facial expression made you feel better? Smiling will always help you feel happy and achieve.
- One step at a time – break the activity you want to achieve into small steps. If you want to start running each week, don’t start with a 5k run. Shorter runs will give you a sense of achievement and motivate you to increase the distance slightly each time you go out.
- Proximity – If you want to go running after work today, lay out your running clothes on your bed and put your trainers by the door. Make achieving your new habit easy for yourself. If you have to search for your trainers, you may find excuses not to find them!
- Tell someone – commit to your new habit by telling someone. You will have to do it now, otherwise you will have to own up to them!
How can this apply to my career change?
If you want to make a career change, the 5 steps mentioned above will help you so you now have a choice…
You can either:
- Keep believing you can’t do it, frown about it, try and discover that one amazing career for yourself in one big enormous leap, leave my book ‘The Tea Model: Slowing down in a fast-paced world to find the career you love’on the bookshelf (!) and not tell anyone you are going to do anything about it.
OR, YOU CAN:
- Believe you can do it, smile about it, start taking small steps towards making that change, place ‘The Tea Model: Slowing down in a fast-paced world to find the career you love’ on the coffee table in front of where you sit (!) and tell someone what you are doing about making a change in your career.
I would suggest choosing number 2 – start making small steps towards your career change (or any change you wish to make) now and you will surprise yourself! Oh yes, and remember to smile!
(Perhaps my Career Change and Career Advancement programme will help you too!)
My passion for helping children has continued in a voluntary capacity leading me over the last couple of years to designing my primary school confidence coaching programme (
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Tessa Armstrong 