1. Identify your biggest time-wasters.
Is it TV? Going out with friends too much? Surfing the Internet without any real purpose?
Whatever it is, don’t stop it completely. Just cut down on that activity.
So if you watch 30-40 hours of TV a week, drop it down by 70% or so. You can still watch, but you’ll now instantly gain more time that you can dedicate to tackling your transition.
After all, wasting time isn’t necessarily a bad activity -- it allows you to relax and recharge. The problem is, you need as much extra time as possible when going after your goals.
2. Identify two or three examples of times when you ran into challenges.
Whether you were successful in overcoming the challenge or not doesn’t matter. Look at these times when you had opportunities to grow. What held you back? What did you do that caused you to flourish?
Once you have a few answers, now figure out your biggest challenge moving forward.
At this point, when working with clients, I often ask them to think about someone they really admire and explain why. I do this because people often describe traits that they feel they lack in terms of self-confidence, self-esteem or self-worth.
When I know these, we can then come up with exercises to form positive habits around the desired characteristics that can help them accomplish their goal. At the very least, this helps build a solid foundation and attitude moving forward.
You can do this same analysis on yourself.
All you do is acknowledge you have a challenge or opportunity in an area you want to improve and then identify steps to move forward.
You see, people change for only one of two reasons – either the pain or the reward is too great to ignore. Once you understand which one is the case for you, self-motivation, self-confidence and self-worth follow.
3. Identify your “five.”
The Law of Five simply states that you are the average of the five people you surround yourself with the most. This applies to all areas of your life, including happiness, wealth, health, athleticism, success and failures.
You can take their average income, health, happiness or whatever attribute you want to gauge and the average of the five is where you will usually fall.
For example, if you want to become a better athlete and you run around with people who are drinkers, overweight and lack motivation, achieving your goal is unlikely. It becomes much more difficult than if you’re around other healthy minded individuals and those with similar goals.
Just like raising a child, it often takes a village to become successful -- you can’t do it alone. If you want to improve in school, hang out and learn from people who are smarter than you. If you want to be more successful at work, hang out with people who already achieved the level of success you desire.
Of course, if you're younger and you have a family, you can’t really get away from those people. But you can choose your friends -- or at least the ones you hang out with most.