Anyone who has ever had a desire to improve themselves has been there. Whether it’s making more money, losing weight, getting stuff off your to do list, or becoming a more healthy, happy and successful human being.
And it’s not like we don’t know what to do. If we want to lose weight, we need to be more active. If we want to increase our success we need to study the right material and implement, and if we want more happiness we have to do more stuff that makes us happy…
But even though we know these things, often there is inertia, and a million reasons not to do them.
As you’re reading this you probably know the immediate actions you should take to accomplish any of those things you want to achieve… Ok, you may not be an expert in that area, but you know what first steps you should take. But we don’t.
And so we try harder, struggling to manipulate ourselves into going for a run before we start work, trying to cut down on the calories, or sugar, or alcohol, or whatever vice we want to conquer.
And eventually, a simple task of improvement turns into a Quest and a question of whether we can conquer ourselves.
All of a sudden it becomes a huge effort.
So how do we make it less of a push, push, push and more of an effortless way of being?
How can we just be that person who gets out for a run, who is naturally successful in business, and who can kick the sugar, or the carbs, or whatever, without turning into a miserable deprived person?
Well, it all comes back to self-image.
How to Change Your Self Image
How we view ourselves has a lot to do with the behaviours we engage in. If we view ourselves as an on-the-ball-sales-person, then we’re more likely to go ahead and make the sale. If we view ourselves as “not salesy” or allergic to sales, then are we going to put ourselves out there?
Probably not. At least not without a huge amount of resistance.
So what we need to do first off is change how we view ourselves.
- Pick a character. The first part of this is to pick a character of someone who embodies what you want to be. If you want to be an actress, pick your favourite actress and look at how she evolves her career. You will very quickly find points of commonality that you can identify with and then you can start to feel, wow, if she can do it, so can I.
- Change you environment. It’s true what they say about us being the product of our environment. If you want to get on in business, if you can change the places you spend time in, like the entrepreneurs networking hubs, rather than your local bar you will find you naturally accumulate more opportunities. It sounds simple, but will you do it?
- See yourself through a different window. Assuming that with just some thoughts and lose decisions you’re going to change your whole personality probably isn’t realistic. But what if you can create just a little shift from where you are. A colleague recently described it as looking out of the window of the house of your personality. You see the same view every day. You know that view. That view is of you eating pizza, drinking beer, all the while wishing you were slim, for example. Instead, what if you moved to another room in the house and looked out of that window. Out of that window you could be walking every day, eating salad and leading a more active life style. Nothing huge has changed. You don’t have to be a different person, but all of a sudden your self-image has shifted and you’re more easily able to take on those new, desirable behaviours.
How I Changed My “Environment” With A GAME!
This is exactly what happened for me a few weeks ago. Studying gamification I came across a iPhone app that I could use when going on my run. The game is called Zombies, Run! It’s an immersion game so as you run a whole story unfolds, and you end up “doing missions” while just running your normal route. The thing is, it makes the experience more entertaining and engaging.
However, the *MOST* interesting thing about it was that I was no longer the “busy building businesses” Laura in this game. I became the action player in the story, “Runner 5”, who had just escaped a helicopter crash and was being chased by zombies…
The game talked to me through my headphone, in between tracks on my playlist, and I became Runner 5 on a mission. Runner 5 is athletic, smart, and has a team guiding her to avoid the zombie. Runner 5 has a reason to run. A purpose. Runner 5 is like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and combat Barbie and GI Jane all rolled into one. Runner 5 can get round the 40 minute run, despite agonising pain in her calves. She just keeps going, through the burn.
When I started playing the game I ran faster and further than ever before.
My whole self-image had shifted. And the shift was subtle, but incredibly effective: much like moving to another room in the house and looking out… The view had changed, which then makes the behaviours very easy to change.
When I run now, even though I don’t always use the game, I am still Runner 5, strong, and athletic, and able to keep going, where desk-Laura would have stopped. I now run more than I have been doing in recent years, and am generally much more active…
But the change in behaviour is far easier to effect once the self-image has shifted.
4 Steps To Changing Your Behaviour
- Choose Something You Would Like To Do
Right now – have a think about something you’d like to do.
Maybe it’s losing weight, finding a new job, growing your business, whatever. It doesn’t matter; just pick something to test it out.
Got something?
- Think Of The Character That You Would Need To Be
Ok, now think about what character you would need to be to just do it naturally. If it’s growing your business, maybe being a Dragon from Dragon’s Den would help.
If you want to find a new job, maybe you can start to see yourself as a free agent, rather than an employee. If you want to lose weight, maybe thinking of yourself as a healthy, active TV yoga personality might connect with you.
Whatever it is, it has to be a character that you can get into.
- Start Seeing Yourself As That Character
Then, start doing the behaviours of that character, and spend some time each day seeing yourself as that character, like I described when I go for my run. It doesn’t have to be elaborate like the running app I describe. Subtle changes in the inner world can make a surprising difference in the outer world.
- COMMITMENT STEP: Think of your character and your new outcome, and tell me what you’re going to try out in the comment section!
And remember – this should be fun! So enjoy the process… 🙂
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