Make your bed
View this email in your browser (|ARCHIVE|) Life can put you on your knees. Or you can feel like you’re out of ideas. You can be overwhelmed by your to-do list. Or that you can’t seem to finish what you start.
No matter how successful you are, |NAME|, you are going to be hit by adversity holding you back from doing your best work, or being the best, bravest version of yourself.
Most things we struggle with in life are things that are solved by change. Sounds simple, right? And yet we make this plain fact difficult. Change seems hard to choose for ourselves.
Excuses: the universe’s most powerful self renewing resource
You know what’s even harder? Finding the will to overlook the endless excuses we make for ourselves.
We resist change because we fear what it might do: invite chaos. And yet sometimes, a little chaos is precisely what we need to precipitate a much needed reordering of things. It’s what economist Joseph Schumpeter once prescribed as a necessary “gale of creative destruction (http://www.economist.com/node/14447179) .”
We also resist because we trick ourselves into believing that change is only meaningful if it is transformative: a huge shift in behaviour, in thinking or in spirit. And that feels like it’s too much work. Too risky.
Most change is not transformative. In fact, the most profound ones we make are unnoticed by others.
Change is the act of doing one thing differently from before.
And choosing to repeat that act.
Making it stick
One of the best pieces advice I’ve ever heard on how to make change that sticks came from an old Buddhist monk. I think I heard it on a podcast but don’t ask me which one.
What’s most important is what he said: make your bed.
Even if you do nothing else that day, you start with a singular, simple act that’s designed to bring order to your life.
When you repeat that act day after day, you’ve made a choice to do something differently than before (unless of course you are one of those people who has always made your bed, in which case my hat’s off to you).
With change, one act becomes a choice. Choice becomes habit. And habit becomes the bravery we need to move forward.
Very best, Patrick
P.S. Throughout December, CreativeBoost goes on its annual hiatus for the holidays. See you in January 2016!
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