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Four Steps to Change Your Life
by C.V. Doner
God on the Net provides a large number of tools to he lp you change your patterns of thinking and acting, your self-defeating strategies, your negative values, etc. But before you can use these tools effectively you will need to develop a new mind set.
In particular:
Knowing - What you want to change and why! In order to"know" you need to examine yourself carefully. What are your values and goals in life and where are you in relationship to them? In other words, how big is the gap between who you want to be or who you say you are and how others experience you? Listen carefully for "feedback." Get in tune with your own desires, disappointments, values and beliefs. Read, reflect and come to "know" what areas in your life you want to enhance, discard, radically alter.
Conviction - once you know what and why you want to change you need to develop the determination to do so. Change isn't easy. Otherwise everyone would be perfect. Psychiatrists, counselors, ministers and "self-help" authors, would be out of business. It seems everyone wants to change, but no one wants to do anything different. That is why we need the conviction down deep in our soul that we must ( not just should ) change. An effective method to turn "belief" or " I should" into conviction - and then into determination - is to get visually and viscerally in touch with the size of the gap between your desires and reality, and in touch with the cost of not changing. What will the cost be: your spiritual well being, your business, your relationships, y our legacy in life? What will the cost be to your children or to your spouse? What is the cost of missed opportunities to make a difference within your life and in the lives of others?
To get in touch with these costs requires a moment of clarity and courage instead of choosing to "numb out" with food, booze, work, sports, your church, or a myriad of other diversions. Look the issue squarely in the face. The more you get in touch with the painful results of not changing, the more determination you will gain.
A Massive Action Plan - These stages (1. knowing what to do, and 2. conviction that it must be done, and determination to follow through) naturally lead to what motivational speaker and author Tony Robbins calls a "massive action plan"-- a strategy (be it one or two steps or a complex five-year plan)-- to reach your goals. (For more insight on goals and planning go to "Goal Setting" in our "Foundations for Success" section o r purchase one of Tony Robin's excellent books offered at our online bookstore.)
Passion - To successfully launch your plan, it's vital to build a sense of urgency, energy, and passion by reviewing your convictions about why you must make this change in your life - now! To build passion, create a vision of how fantastic things will be when y ou have accomplished your goal.
Now go to work. Changing your life takes both effort and time; after all, whatever you are seeking to change probably took years to set in place. Don't expect to change it in just a few days. Don't confuse your ideal (total change) with how you measure your success (incremental progress). As long as you are working on it, success will come so be patient. (For more on measuring your success, go to our article entitled, "Success depends on high you set your hurdles".) Most of all, be ready to do the work necessary to bring about transformation. It's your opportunity to break through the previously mentioned conundrum "Everyone wants to change but nobody wants to do anything about it."
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