2022 August 9 Big changes a little at a time

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website by, for, and about Baby Boomers. Thanks for joining me tonight for a little talk on how to make big changes a little at a time. 

So let's get started. Our theme for tonight is making big changes a little bit at a time.  Being consistent with our theme, we're not going to try and cover everything all at once, but we're just going to cover the starting points of our little journey together. As regular followers know - and this is a good time to remind you, please hit the like button if you enjoy this - as my regular followers know, our mission here is to create the life that we want, by first consciously deciding what we want, then defining our goals as to how we're going to get there, envisioning our goals in great detail, and then letting our minds lead us to the choices consistent with our vision.

It sounds simple. The good news is that actually it is pretty simple, but the biggest challenges are probably maintaining our momentum and recognizing our wins. Honestly, this is always a challenge for me, and I have some great help in doing that. I'm in two accountability groups with friends in which I participate, and then James Wedmore's BBD (Business By Design) and Next Level programs, which are just fantastic. 

There's two trade shows coming up, for example, which I expect to attend: Podcast Movement, in just a couple weeks, and FinCon at the beginning of September, and many more things like that. So there's lots of external things, so I am trying to engage with people who are likely to encourage me and who I can encourage so that we work together towards our goals.

Way down at the very lowest levels, we still have to get through each and every day, with all those pesky details. I've tried and discarded an endless number of different planners. In some ways, I'm a bit of a contrarian. So I'm always looking for something that's a little bit different. So it occurred to me this morning that there's no reason why I just can't create my very own planner with all the things that I want, and skip all the things that don't matter to me. 

For example, I don't want half a page showing the whole day laid out in half hour increments. I have a calendar for that - a work calendar, a personal calendar. Do they do a fine job?  That layout works for a lot of people. So a lot of planners are based around that, but it just doesn't work for me. It's space that's not really well used. But I'm very interested in what I want to do in the morning versus the midday versus the afternoon and evening.

No one has that yet, because one of my first projects for this week is to start my own plan and design. Once it's done, it'll be available free to our community, of course, and we may just post it online as a kind of a public service. So is this breathtakingly amazing? No, but it's a small step towards removing a mental block and even an excuse.

It helps me to be more enthusiastic about organizing my day every day. Very importantly, it allows me a method to track both the good things that happen in my day, and to track and celebrate my wins. We've spoken before about the importance of remembering to celebrate our wins. I was just working with someone on this very subject, a friend, last week and reminding them that - they put something in very demeaning terms - and reminding them that actually they accomplished a lot, and by saying that, and being pleased with what they did, it'll encourage them to do more of the same sorts of things and make progress. We all make progress almost every day, but almost all of us forget to acknowledge it and reward ourselves. The reward can be as simple as telling someone, Hey, I finally washed the front door. I almost didn't recognize where I live, it is so clean!

It doesn't have to be earth shattering. It just has to be important to us. But the very other very important thing is that we're actively participating in our planning and creating our own future. This is super important. Life doesn't always go like we might want, like tonight. I'm a half hour late because of things that I wasn't expecting to happen, but I am here.

So I could have a choice. I can either remember that. Ah, I was half an hour late to start. It really let down a lot of people or I could say I went through and found an alternative way to accomplish my goal, and I did do my goal. I am online as close to the proper time as I could be. That's a mental choice we have to make every time something happens. By having a planner where we have a place to write that down, then that gives us one more way to remember and reward ourselves for the things that went right during our day, even if they started off not so right. If we recovered them, that still counts as a win.

As we talked about last week, good ideas don't bring about changes. It's acting on good ideas that bring about the change to ourselves and to the world around us. Also taking a small step. This one small step. We now have something every single day to remind us that we're making progress, that we're actively doing something that is important to us and consistent with our goals.

We'll talk some more about some of the other things that I plan on, including in my little journal template. I'm considering various ways of doing this so that it's easy to recreate at home. That way you too can take the template and make it do exactly what you want it to do, so that it's most relevant to your life and to your priorities.

So stay tuned, we'll see how it comes out. We'll probably have a lot of iterations along the way. I hope to get some feedback, and we'll put in things that other people like, and we can do because we're doing it ourselves. This is really important. We can put in all the things that we want and leave out the things that just aren't relevant.

So the most important part is by actively deciding to make a change and then taking the actions necessary to bring that into a reality, we are actually participating in our future. It makes our mind more interested, and we get a lot of encouragement - internal encouragement - to move ahead and actually work towards our goals.

So good luck thinking about what small and large steps you want to do to help you move close to your goals. I'd encourage you also to share them with someone else to help motivate you to continue when challenges arise, because they always do. But we all have the ability to move past them. 

So that's it for the evening. Thanks so very much for stopping by. Stay healthy. Care for others, and remember to care for yourself, so you can always be at your best 

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So as always be true to yourself. Live life aligned with your true goals and feelings. Thanks for stopping by. If you found something interesting and useful, please pass it along. If not, please drop me a comment as to what you'd like to hear. Remember, please hit the like button if you enjoyed what we covered, and have a great week. Thanks for visiting. Remember to live the life that you dreamed of because that's the path to true contentment. Love and encouragement to everyone, and see you next week at 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com. Thank you.