How To Change Your Life (Without Burning Out)

When you want to change on a bigger level, I’ve found that starting small tends to allow for those massive changes to accrue over time. 

When you want to change the way you think, one small reframe a day can make all the difference. Shifting our outlook on the world isn’t an overnight miracle, it’s learning to find enough presence throughout the day to recognize the thought patterns that continually arise. Awareness allows us to then make a conscious choice to decide if those thoughts are ones we wish to keep or if there are new stories we might want to begin telling ourselves. It is in the moments of recognizing and reframing that we find what’s buried within and begin to unearth it.

When you want to change how you feel, you make a choice to feel what is happening within your body for a short time. You make a decision to sit in the discomfort and allow the judgment to dissipate in order to simply feel what’s coming up. The more you can allow yourself to feel what’s happening and rid yourself of the shame around any particular feelings, the more you’re able to sit in an emotion, process and feel it, then respond, instead of solely reacting to what is happening under the surface.

When you want to change your life, you make one small shift a day. You sustain that shift and then build onto it with new practices that morph your life into one you’ve consciously built by choice. Sustaining the first habit gives you the self-trust and confidence to branch out further from your safety zone and push yourself to new heights.

Change is not a race, though we often think it is. It isn’t hustling until you burn out. It’s allowing yourself to slowly let go of what once was and make room for so much more. When you let go of what isn’t working and slowly incorporate new changes, you may just look back and realize that the snowball effect of simultaneously letting go and bringing in at a steady pace has led to a brighter life than you could have imagined not so long ago.