Do you want to make self-improvements this year? Have you tried to make changes before but where quickly burnt out and discouraged by the process? Are you worried that you aren’t capable of adopting new healthy behaviours?
In January, many people want to improve themselves. Because they feel so driven, they can make ambitious plans that seem guaranteed to give them quick results.
Unfortunately for the majority of people, these changes don’t last very long because their approach is unsustainable. What you expect from yourself can soon become too demanding, you begin making mistakes, and you run out of energy so you give up.
When this happens, you can feel responsible for not having enough motivation, strength, determination, etc. But far more often than not, the reason you weren’t able to stay committed was more due to your approach rather than any personal shortcomings.
Although much of the messaging around personal development is that it’s only possible with a rigorous approach that’s perfectly executed, this isn’t true. In order to make real and lasting changes, it’s necessary to implement methods you can maintain long-term.
Adopting a healthy and sustainable approach that avoids some of these common misconceptions about the best ways to change can be easier when you’re aware of what they are and why they’re misleading.
Genuine change is a long-term process, but unlike demanding plans that promise fast results as long as you execute them perfectly, it has the potential to be a positive experience.
Common false beliefs about changing
There are a many people – both those with credentials as well as self-proclaimed experts – who make powerful claims about the best ways to achieve self-improvement, whether this is building new habits, quitting unhealthy behaviours, accomplishing ambitious goals, or a combination of these. They can insist that their methods for losing weight, becoming a better communicator, getting a promotion, improving your relationships, and much more, are the only ones that are effective. Some can be very persuasive and come with plenty of testimonials verifying their ability to enable you to succeed, despite – or because of – their strict and challenging requirements.
But their claims are often misleading, and some even by set you up to fail through being too demanding. Yet when people do become overwhelmed and give up, they often feel that they were to blame for not being able to stay committed instead of considering if the approach they were told they needed to adopt was unsustainable.
Even if you aren’t following someone else’s specific program, it can still be difficult not to be influenced by these types of messages insisting that a demanding approach is the only possible way to change.
This isn’t an effective, sustainable, or rewarding approach to self-improvement for the vast majority of people. You’re much more likely to be able to make genuine lasting improvements if you understand what makes so many popular claims about changing inaccurate and consider healthier alternatives instead.
The most common of these include:
1) You have to commit to a lot all at once
Plenty of programs and techniques for accomplishing goals, including those for self-improvement, recommend beginning by committing to many new behaviours at the same time. Even if you aren’t following a program, you can believe that it’s necessary to give yourself a rigorous regime to follow or else you’re being lazy so you’ll never accomplish your goals.
But beginning slowly is often necessary if you want the changes you’re making to be sustainable and to give the process the best chance of being (at least somewhat) enjoyable.
Beginning slowly means adopting only a few behaviours initially and/or having lower expectations for what you should be able to regularly accomplish, such as taking a fifteen-minute walk with the intention of eventually going on hour-long runs or developing communication skills as the first step of improving your relationships.
By slowly committing to new behaviours and increasing what you expect from yourself, you’re giving yourself the opportunity to build habits and form routines. These are incredibly useful when making changes because they make new behaviours automatic so they require much less effort to carry out. This could be putting your phone away at a certain time every night, spending at least a few minutes practicing a skill each evening, or stretching in the morning.
Trying to make too many behaviours habitual all at once is likely to be exhausting since building habits can require a significant amount of effort. But if you slowly increase what you expect from yourself, your new behaviours can become long-term habits.
2) You must completely leave your comfort zone
As well as asking you to commit to a great deal all at once, many approaches to self-improvement also expect you to implement many behaviours that are new and potentially quite foreign to you. But if you adopt this approach to change, you’re likely asking yourself to largely abandon your comfort zone.
Your comfort zone refers to what you can do easily and confidently. There can be things you’re somewhat comfortable doing, meaning they’re just outside of your comfort zone, and more challenging things that are completely out of your comfort zone.
Doing things that are outside of your comfort zone takes more energy than those you’re already comfortable with because you often have a great deal to learn, you’re unsure if you’re capable of accomplishing what you’re attempting, and you have very little experience to guide you. This makes committing to too many new behaviours challenging and typically unsustainable.
To avoid this, consider what you’re already comfortable with and how you could utilise these skills to slowly and sustainably grow your comfort zone. As your comfort zone expands, you’ll feel capable of adopting more and more behaviours that help you advance your goals. This could be not drinking soda as a first step to improving your health, giving up more unhealthy foods over time, and gradually eating more and more vegetables, rather than expecting yourself to immediately begin eating an ideal diet after years of being unhealthy.
However, it’s important to be aware that change without discomfort is impossible. Your brain likes the predictability of familiarity so trying to make changes, even if you know they’re good for you, will feel difficult simply because they’re new. So you’ll have to leave your comfort zone if you want to grow.
Self-improvement is the most enjoyable and sustainable when you identify small ways you can challenge yourself to expand your comfort zone and prove that you’re capable of more than you initially thought.
3) Change is only about behaviour
Self-improvement requires changing your behaviour, but it isn’t the first or only thing that you need to address when you want to change. To make self-improvement more sustainable, you also need to address your self-identity.
Self-identity is the type of person you think you are. It includes broad generalities as well as more specific qualities. This could include thinking of yourself as a parent, someone who tends to overreact when they’re upset, and an avid reader.
When you decide to make changes, it’s important to shift your self-identity to reflect the type of person you want to become. If you still think of yourself as a smoker, then quitting smoking will be very difficult because giving up cigarettes isn’t aligned with who you think you are.
It also makes self-improvement a more positive experience because instead of only focusing on behaviours, it helps you remain aware of what you’re working to achieve. Enjoying the process is essential to long-term goals, which those aimed at self-improvement almost always are, since they often lack the finality that other types of goals can have, such as buying a house after years of saving or graduating with a degree.
Although self-identities are built over the course of your life, they can often be changed relatively quickly. Consider the type of person you want to become, remind yourself that this is who you are now, and pay attention to your actions to find evidence to support that you’re behaving consistently with your new identity. This can be telling yourself ‘I’m a healthy person and that’s why I’m only going to have one small slice of cake”, or “I’m a good communicator so I’m going to stay calm during this disagreement”. The more examples you can give yourself that you’ve changed, the more confident you can be that you’ll be able to maintain these behaviours long-term.
When personal change reflects your self-identity, you can also be less impacted by mistakes. Without adjusting your self-identity, mistakes can feel like evidence that change isn’t possible. But if you believe that your new behaviours reflect who you’ve become, then mistakes are easier to think of as isolated incidences.
4) Complicated plans are more effective
Some people believe that change requires complicated plans: detailed regimes to follow, apps that track your progress, and large amounts of research to inform every decision.
Deciding the details of when and how you’ll choose different behaviours is important – running each morning before getting ready for work, spending half an hour practicing a skill after dinner, signing up for a weekly class, etc. – as this enables you to create routines that make consistency much easier. But plans can become overly-complicated and lack the flexibility they need to be realistic.
If your plan is too complicated, it can fall apart whenever you’re feeling challenged or there are even small changes to your environment or routines.
When plans are difficult to follow, even if it’s just because of their complexity, there will be too many opportunities for mistakes. But when plans are as simple as possible, you should be able to make fewer mistakes.
To simplify your approach to self-improvement, ask yourself what the most straight-forward method probably is and how you could make it easy enough to work for you.Having time for a hobby could require less scrolling on your phone. Saving money may mean going out less often. Learning a new language requires practice.
Just because a plan is simple doesn’t mean that it’s easy, but by considering that there could be a simple approach, you can discover methods and solutions you may have overlooked and feel more capable of success.
5) You can’t make any mistakes
Approaches to self-improvement that don’t allow for mistakes or recognise you’ll have days where you’re not capable of as much as usual are setting you up for failure.
Expecting yourself to always be flawless is an incredibly demanding and unrealistic approach that doesn’t consider the obstacles you’ll inevitably face: getting sick, stressful periods at work, having more responsibilities than usual, etc.
The most sustainable and rewarding plans are those that allow you to do less than you normally would without feeling guilty or that you’re failing. If you tell yourself that under the right circumstances you don’t have to do as much as usual, you’re less likely to get upset with yourself and/or the program, think you’ve fallen of the wagon, and give up.
To make a plan that’s flexible, you need rules around changing your expectations of yourself so you know when you’re making mistakes rather than taking a strategic and temporary slow-down or break. Be clear on what circumstances make it acceptable for you to do less than usual. What do you expect yourself to do when you’re on holiday? If you’re feeling stressed, is it better to maintain your routine for supportive structure or would you need a break? When will give yourself a break rather than pushing yourself to get back to work?
For the times you decide you can reduce your expectations for yourself, consider what the acceptable minimums are, such as going for a walk if you’re not up for the gym or watching a movie with subtitles instead of practicing a second language. By giving yourself a minimum of what you can do to feel that you’ve accomplished something, you can avoid days, or even weeks, where you feel that you’ve completely abandoned your goals so betting back on track can be much easier than feeling you’ve given up and must start over.
Even when you do make mistakes, these shouldn’t be thought of as evidence that you’re not capable of accomplishing what you want to achieve. You can learn a great deal from your mistakes and use them to adjust your plans and/or what you expect from yourself. Your approach could be too demanding or your plan was overly-complicated and causing you to make mistakes.
6) Keep persevering no matter what
Some approaches to self-improvement tell you to push through all discomfort because the results you’ll get are worth it. But if you attempt change with the belief that you must force yourself to stay productive and committed even when you’re feeling challenged and struggling, you’re likely to experience exhaustion, overwhelm, stress, and eventually burnout, making this type of approach not only unsustainable, but potentially harmful to your health as well.
Although there are few, if any, meaningful changes you’ll be able to make without experiencing some discomfort and feeling challenged at times, this isn’t the same as consistently struggling. Even if you are able to do everything you need to do but you’re often exhausted by it, worried at the thought of maintaining this routine, and needing to push yourself to stay on-program, you’re at a high risk of experiencing stress and burnout.
Stress is caused by believing that what you have to accomplish is more than you’re capable of. Small amounts of temporary stress are harmless and can even be beneficial by motivating you to work harder. But if stress lasts too long and feels permanent, it’s likely to be damaging to your mental health; stress is exhausting, distracting, and makes everything else harder, leading to more challenges that cause even more stress and potentially burnout.
Stress causes you to think poorly of yourself and doubt what you’re capable of, so believing you can change becomes difficult if not impossible. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, incompetent and incapable of making good decisions, then it’s natural that you’ll choose behaviours that reflect these types of thoughts.
Feeling stressed by how you’re approaching self-improvement is a strong sign that your methods are unsustainable. You may be able to achieve some short-term success, such as intensively practicing a new skill for several weeks or losing some weight through a demanding diet, but these benefits rarely last and any gains are likely outweighed by the costs.
Self-improvement doesn’t actually improve your life if the methods you employ in an attempt to achieve it make you less happy and healthy overall.
7) Self-improvement always requires doing more
The majority of approaches to self-improvement expect you to do more – be more productive, disciplined, successful, stronger – but it’s possible that what you actually need to get closer to becoming your ideal version of yourself is slowing down and doing less.
When considering the best ways to achieve self-improvement, especially when turning to ‘experts’, online advice, and social media, it’s common to be overwhelmed with recommendations of habits to adopt that are guaranteed to help you improve: getting up before 5AM, drinking smoothies, downloading apps to develop skills, etc.
These practices could be healthy, but if they take too much energy from you, either because you’re already committed to enough and/or they aren’t a good fit for your personality, then they’re unlikely to help you feel that you’ve improved. It’s worthwhile to consider the possibility that the ideal version of yourself you’re working to become is less busy, doesn’t expect as much from themselves, feels more comfortable relaxing, and appreciates the value of slowing down.
Slowing down can give you the time and space you need to feel at ease with yourself, the energy to recognise and address problems, and the calmness to treat people with more patience and understanding. You may accomplish less than you’re capable of, but you can enjoy rewards that are better than increased productivity.
Self-improvement does require changes, but these aren’t always about doing more and pushing yourself harder. Giving yourself permission to expect less from yourself could be what is needed to feel closer to your ideal version of who you want to be.
Self-improvement can be difficult, especially when you’re not sure how to adopt an approach that’s sustainable and enriching.
To make the process easier, many people choose to work with a professional. Mental health professionals, including coaches, with experience in behaviour change can help you identify beliefs that make changing difficult, work with you to develop sustainable plans, and suggest ways of motivating and reassuring yourself when you’re feeling challenged while acting as an accountability partner to keep you motivated and on track.
Self-improvement is achievable without professional assistance, but working with a professional can remove a great deal of the trial and error that is often necessary to discovering the approaches that work best for you, make it easier to shift your mindset, and help you feel less alone.
When you approach self-improvement with sustainable methods based in the belief that you’re choosing behaviours that align with your ideal version of yourself, changing becomes a rewarding process that improves your mental health, sense of self, and overall wellbeing.
Yet many common approaches to change can be detrimental and only offer short-term gains.
Rather than approaching self-improvement as a process that can be quickly completed to achieve fast results through challenging methods, you can make change sustainable and more positive by adopting plans that aren’t overly demanding so you can maintain them long-term.
Change will always require effort and sone discomfort, but this shouldn’t be more than is necessary.
