Author: Amy D'Annibale

Welcome to week four of my series on permanent change. In week one, we looked at the difference between achievement and life-style change. We completed a worksheet designed to help you get clear on what you’ll need to do to fit change into your life. If you didn’t get that, please go back to “How to Plan a Coup” and go ahead and get your copy of the worksheet from the link there.

In week two, we talked about making room in your life so that you actually can complete a change, or achieve a goal. Last week, we worked on how to believe that change is possible and if you did the work there, you saw how your belief fluctuates day-to-day and you learned how to increase your belief. This week, in honor of national Give Up Your Resolution Day, we’ll take a deep dive into how to trust yourself to actually do the thing you set out to do.

This year, you’re going to stage a coup. Even if you haven’t committed to anything yet, even if you’ve already started and given up. That’s right. No matter how you approach it, you’re going to change this year – whether you plan to or not.

The key to actually achieving your goal is to plan it and then execute the plan. Sounds simple but it’s wicked hard. Here are three planning tricks I bet you’ve never tried.

1: Plan To Delight Your (immediate) Future Self

I’ve blogged a lot about planning but here’s something I bet you don’t think of when you plan – your future self. No, I don’t mean the future you who has the new job, learned the cool coding language or got a great project. I mean the person you’ll be tomorrow when you have to take the first step.

I played a game with myself this week. I wrote down in detail each thing I was going to eat one day ahead of time. Then, I tried to follow my plan. I had said I’d make cereal with skim milk. We had none, and my car was in the shop. I skipped the meal, waiting for my husband to come home. I didn’t have spinach, I went to the store and got it. On it went. It was really hard. Then, I found myself at 5 pm with nothing planned for the time of day I like to sit outside and have a toddy or coffee and read. Bummer. I caved. I had 2 toddies, and from there on, it was a free for all.

I didn’t plan with any consideration for myself. I didn’t think about how much I like my happy hour, I didn’t think about what it would be like if anything went wrong. Folks, that was the opposite of self-care.

I did the experiment again, designing my food plan to delight my future self. I had a plan for coffee and a vita-muffin at 5 pm, I made sure I had everything I needed and I planned food that I would love. I treated my future self like gold. How did I do? Easy Peasy. I stuck to it like glue.

So when you plan what you’re going to do, plan to delight yourself, plan to hit your goal in a way that is all about making the you of tomorrow feel well treated.

2: Plan to Build Trust

Look, trusting that you will do what you say you’ll do is the cat’s pajamas. We work hard to make sure other people believe that we’ll come through at work. Our reputations matter a lot. Why? Because if we don’t live up to our commitments, then we won’t be trusted with the good projects, we won’t get opportunities and we’ll wind up doing the same thing day after day. We want the good work, the meaningful work, the great stuff. We get it by living up to expectations and delivering on commitments.

Dude, it’s the same deal with you & yourself.

If we don’t live up to our commitments to ourselves, we won’t trust ourselves. We’ll hesitate to take on new challenges because we’ve burned our bridge with ourselves. We won’t believe us when we say that we’re going to get a raise, or we’re going to hit our goals, or we’re going to get a better job.

How would it feel to know, one hundred percent, that if you committed to something just for your self, that you would for sure come through?

That feeling? Is insanely good. How do you get it? By planning carefully. Set yourself up to win. I was always very careful not to promise my son anything that I wasn’t going to deliver. When times got tough, I was able to ask him if he believed that I would do what I said. Even though our relationship was strained at that moment, he had to say yes. He trusted that I would do what I said. I felt ten feet tall and at the same time, I felt very grounded. Why? Because I believed it too.

Plan carefully, and remind yourself during execution that you’re building trust with yourself. With that kind of relationship with yourself, you can soar. You can build an amazing life starting right where you’re at.

3: Retrain Your Brain

This is all about execution. This is the DO part of plan / do.

During the execution of any plan, you’ll feel a pull to waffle a bit, to stop and check email, to read one news story, to find a better playlist, to do a bit of “research” on the internet. These things come up as urges. Sudden impulses to quit on yourself and distract yourself.

Humans are hardwired to seek pleasure, immediately, and avoid pain – permanently. The problem is, the pain we experience most of the time is emotional pain brought on by circumstances that our ancestors even a hundred years ago never dreamed of.

That emotional pain is caused by our thoughts.

“I’m a fraud.” “This project is taking longer than I thought and I won’t finish in time.” “I don’t have everything I need and I’ve waited too long.” “I have to make this report perfect or people will think something bad about me.”

The list never ends. No, listen, the list seriously never ends. That’s why it’s key to learn how to allow an urge without answering it. When you feel that pull to check emails, don’t resist it. And don’t give in either. If you resist it, you’ll go home exhausted. Will power is not a good plan long term. And if you give in, the darn thing will become stronger next time.

You have to retrain your brain. You do this by allowing. You notice the urge to check emails. You acknowledge it. ( I try to name the feeling that preceded the urge, such as frustration, or anxiety.) Then you hang out with it for a few seconds. Play with it. Here’s how it looks:

I feel anxious and I want to go find a new playlist to listen to while I work. I think – this is an urge. Why do I want to stop working and answer this urge? Because I feel frustrated. What’s that like? I feel tight in the shoulders. I feel tension in my jaw. Let me hang with this. Can I get more frustrated? Let’s see how I can build it up. That’s interesting. Can I make it less? Make it more again? Am I still OK? Yes? OK, good. That’s an urge. I want to avoid frustration by answering the urge but that will just make things worse. I’m going to go back to work.

That’s the art of allowing an urge to be there and not answering it. The next time I feel frustrated, the strength of the urge to distract myself will be less. If I do that enough, the urges will die down and my confidence will go way up.

To build a great working relationship with yourself – plan to delight yourself, plan to build trust and then make your relationship with yourself a priority, and retrain your brain by decommissioning urges. If you can do these three things, you can stage a coup for the ages.

And that? Is Magic.

Like short blogs? This is the one for you. It’s really late and I’m busting this out because I’m committed to getting this out to you all each and every Monday.

Two weeks ago, the blog focused on the difference between viewing your goal as a one-time achievement or a lifestyle change. Click Here for your free worksheet.

Last week, I talked about clearing out room in your life to accomplish your new goal. The most critical place to create space in your life is in your mind.

The next step to permanent change is the way you talk to yourself about that change.

When I’m on track for achieving something, my thoughts go something like this – I’m excited. I wonder how much closer I’ll get today? This is going to be great. How can I do this? What should I do next?

I know I’m not going to get very far when I think like this: I’m struggling. I’m falling behind. I hope I can do this. I’m not very good at this. I haven’t done well, I need to do better. I’ll do better tomorrow.

You might not think that how you manage your mind is the major factor in achieving change, but I beg to differ. Look at the thoughts in the first example. See how many of them are open-questions? The person thinking that way is already on their way to finding more opportunities for success.

So how to do you come around to that way of thinking?

• Each day – fill one side of a notebook page with positive thoughts about your goal.
• Then restate your goal.
• Then ask yourself how you feel about your goal.
• If you feel positive, ask yourself what action you should take.
• If you feel negative, ask yourself what other thoughts you could have and what action you can take to overcome that negative feeling.

Write all this down on paper, keep the pages together. Do this for 30 days.

Review the pages and think about what you learned.

Here’s what I learned when I did this. First off, it feels great to give yourself a daily cheering on for a full page. Second, half the time I would repeat my goal statement and feel negative or doubtful and half of the time I would feel positive. I could always think of something I could do to help me with my goal.

After a while, I realized that my feelings about my goal weren’t actually accurate. At any given time I might be upbeat or pessimistic, yet there were always other ways to look at it and action I could take. The way I felt stopped being such a big deal. I started to choose to feel positive. The more days I took action, the more success I had, the more enthusiastic I became and the more success I had.

It’s a giant flywheel for change – belief, action, results, belief, action, results.

So step three for permanent change is to start to take active steps to manage your belief.

If you want help learning how – I’d love to walk you through it. Try a 25-minute session free – sign up here.

The most wildly productive year I’ve ever had started with me quitting. I stole a page from Brian Tracy and quit everything that wasn’t my day job or my volunteer gig. I did it so that I could see just exactly what I would put into the space that opened up for me.

Here’s what I packed into that year – making a lifelong dream come true, starting a new business, forty-five pounds of weight loss, a new position at work, a hike across Scotland and year of being coached by three awesome teachers. That was a pretty cool year. When I look back on that fabulous year of growth, the feeling that invariably hits me is a feeling of – space.

To start that year, I had to create space for change and when I did, the results were magical.

You can have a magical year too. You can.

It takes a certain type of work to do it, but you have it in you. The best part is? Just getting to the starting point of clear space feels so darn good, you might want to try it for the feeling of freedom and invigoration alone.

You in? Let’s get started.

When we want to make a major change at work, or in our personal lives, we need to create space for it. I highly advise trying the full-on quit everything tactic. If you don’t want to just chuck everything that isn’t nailed down – physically and/or metaphorically as I did, you’ll need to create pockets of space.

To start, clarify if you need to create space for a one-time achievement or a lifestyle change. Click these links to check my blog from last week and pick up your free worksheet here.

A single achievement – earning a degree, putting on an addition, completing a large project or hitting a target objective requires concrete blocks of space in your calendar and dedicated planning and reframing time. We’ll talk about reframing in a minute. What’s important here is the idea that this type of goal ends. You can go all-in on one thing and depending on the length of the project, you can even let some things in your life slide while you do it.

A workstyle or lifestyle change requires a more creative thought process. You’ll still need planning and reframing but you’ll also need to think about the space you create in terms of an on-going commitment and identity change. This is the type of change space that asks us to really rip open our current patterns and start restitching them into something new. It’s scary and it’s amazing.

If you try to cram in changes without creating space for them – be that space in your calendar or space in your mind to really work out how to do them, you’re probably going to wind up back in the old grind, snapping awake somewhere in August realizing another year has gone by and your opportunity for change one year older. Sigh.

I feel you, but one year older is one year wiser and you’re ready this time.

There are a few ways to create space for the changes you want to make. First, you can hit a few out of the park right away by completing that worksheet from last week. If you did it already, great. Head back to the section where you listed what you had to do more of and less of if you wanted to hit the lifestyle sweet spot. All those “do less of this…” statements probably share some common elements. Spend a few minutes refining them.

Things like – spend less time with email checking, unproductive meetings, and busy work are the low hanging fruit. We clear these things out and then we find them slipping back in again, like weeds or unwanted spam. So go through your sheet and make those changes the first thing on your list for clearing space.

For me, I want to have more interaction with our customers, not to hear what they want from IT, but so that I can understand what their goals and objectives are, so I can start to suggest ways that IT can help. That’s a pretty tall order for me, but it’s the direction I need to move. To have the time and breadth of experience to do this successfully, I’m going to need more space on my calendar. This is also a workstyle change for me since I don’t intend to return to my current way of doing things. I’ll need more drastic clearing, so I’m going to use my three favorite space creators.

1 – delegate

Delegation is one way to get more space at work. On our team, we delegate down and sideways. When someone on the team has a special project, we work to delegate sideways so that we increase cross-training and create pockets of opportunity. Even if you’re not a manager, you can create a team ethos for this type of delegation by volunteering to be a delegee. Then, when opportunity strikes, you can delegate.

The key to being a better delegator is to understand how to pass off tasks fully packaged. We tend to unpack tasks and dictate the steps to complete in order to be sure the next person gets it all done just right. This takes way too long and helps nobody. Practice delegating the result you want. Let your teammate unpack the project and figure out how to get it done.

Another key component is to delegate meaningful work. If you’re asking a team member to unpack and figure out how to deliver a result, then they get to experience full contribution. That makes work meaningful. Make the work you turn over the type of work that gives them a chance to shine.

2 – quit

You heard me. JUST STOP DOING LESS VALUABLE STUFF.

Stop going to meetings where there’s no agenda. Stop decorating your office. Stop wandering around looking for coffee at 2 pm. Stop going to that monthly meeting for Office People In Favor of Plants. Sure, all the other attendees will be disappointed if you quit. Maybe. The fact is, you have no clue what they’ll think and frankly, it’s none of your business. Your business is the business of getting yourself to the life you want to live and the work that’s most important. They’ll be fine. Just. Quit.

3 – reframe

All of this is meaningless unless you can clear space in your mind. This is a repetitive chore and the basis for all the thought work coaching done by myself and my peers. I’ve seen a direct correlation between time spent on thought work and productivity in my life and that correlation is the reason I became a coach. I want to pass that on to you.

As you try to change, as you quit things, and stop doing stuff a ton of resistance and worries and doubts are going to come up in your brain. This. Is. Normal.

Thought work involves writing down your thoughts about whatever work is ahead of you today and then picking out some of your less than stellar thoughts. You then put them through a rigorous analysis until you can clearly see the patterns of behavior you need to enact to get your results. You can get a sense of this by going to my very first blog post – and watching the video on the coolest tool you’re for sure not using.

I put thought work under “clearing space” because it eliminates rumination, self-doubt and increases focus, all of which create more time for you to focus on doing what really matters.

And that? Is step two in the five steps to permanent change.

If you would like to work one on one with me for free and have me show you how to clean out space in your thoughts, book a free session here. I’d love to teach this tool to you.

See you next week for step three in the five steps to permanent change.