How to Make Personal Change Happen

No one is perfect, and no one ever will be, but many people are unhappy with their lives and themselves. That unhappiness can stem from a lot of different sources, including self-esteem issues, an unsatisfying job or frustration over the inability to break a bad habit. Regardless of its source, unhappiness with an aspect of your life can taint your whole life. You can break that cycle by making personal change happen.

Analyze

• The first step toward making personal change happen is analyzing what needs to change. Take some time to think about what you don’t like about your life right now. Identify something you’d like to change. Some common examples of personal change include managing stress better, losing weight, getting healthier, continuing education and becoming more organized.

Set a Goal

• Set a goal for personal change. Take a moment to envision what you want your life to look like once you’ve achieved your goal. Keep your aspiration realistic—for example, if you want to lose weight, don’t choose a total weight loss goal that would put you at an unhealthily thin Body-Mass Index score. If your goal is difficult to achieve and will take longer than a few days to get to, consider setting several smaller objectives that you can accomplish along the way.

Make a Plan

• The next step is constructing a plan that you can follow to reach your goal. This plan should be customized for you and for your particular goal. If your goal is to become more organized, but you have a very hectic schedule, don’t make a plan to organize everything in one long period of work. Break it up into smaller chunks that you can fit into your schedule. If you need help coming up with a workable plan, ask a friend or a professional—for example, talk to your doctor or a weight loss consultant if your goal involves getting healthy and losing weight. Make sure your plan includes specific tasks that can be completed and checked off on a day-to-day basis, as well as a general timeline for how long you intend to keep it up.

Follow Through

• Following through is the most important and often the most difficult step in the process. Once you’ve made a plan that works for you, stick to it. Start small if you need to. Check off tasks according to your plan. If you skip your plan for one day, make yourself get back to it the next day. If you feel yourself deviating from your plan often, either reevaluate and revise your plan or enlist the support of a friend. This step is where you’ll begin to see change happen, even if it starts very slowly. Often, the first signs of positive change are enough of a boost to keep you on the right path to personal change.

Maintain

• Once you’ve achieved your goal, congratulate yourself. You’ve made a positive change in your life. But you can’t sit back and relax now or you’ll risk relapsing into old habits. Now you should move into a maintenance phase. You’ll need to devote some effort to maintaining your personal change, but not as much effort as you expended to get there in the first place. If you’ve just succeeded in becoming more organized, for example, make a new plan for keeping up your newly found organization skills—devote half an hour a day to tidying up your home, or devote one day a week to organizing files and paperwork. Ideally, the maintenance phase of personal change will become integrated into your lifestyle, so it no longer requires significant exertion to maintain the positive results of your efforts.