Change is hard work, so hard in fact that it often feels like an impossible task. It can feel especially impossible when we get stuck in a cycle of thinking things like, “This is just who I am” or “It’s always been this way.”
We brought in Dai Manuel, lifestyle mentor, fitness coach, and author of Dai Manuel’s Whole Life Fitness Manifesto: 30 Minutes a Day for a Healthier Body, Mind and Spirit, to talk to us about making positive changes in our lives. Now 14 years sober, Dai knows well how simple it is to use quick gratifications like food and alcohol to soothe the pain we’re holding and often ignoring internally. Here are the 3 lessons you’ll learn from this episode of Best Places to Lead if you’re embarking on your own change journey in 2023: why it’s hard, how to get started, and how to keep it moving.
As an overview, here are the top 3 lessons from Dai Manuel’s episode:
- Change takes work, and it’s worth it.
- Change starts with 3 simple questions.
- Simple movement is key to shifting both our mind and our body.
Lesson #1: Change takes work!
Even the smallest change, like making your coffee at home every morning, can seem like a huge task. People are creatures of habit, and making any sort of change means breaking out of routine. As Dai explains, it means us “doing something different than we’ve probably done before, trying to create new types of results we’ve identified we want, and… it doesn’t feel normal.”
Dai compares being in the middle of change to feeling like you’re in the middle of a tornado. It’s that absence of normalcy, that feeling of whirling chaos, that, in a word, discomfort which makes going through any kind of change difficult. But discomfort is what we need to grow. And it’s when we reach the other side and reflect on what we’ve achieved, he notes, where we feel all those good feelings that go along with achieving our goal.
Lesson #2: Ask yourself these 3 questions to get started.
Despite how difficult it can appear to start making positive changes in your life, there are only 3 simple questions you need to ask in order to get started:
- Can I do this?
- If I do this, will it actually work?
- Am I worth this change?
Each question builds on the one before it, so we need to be able to answer “yes” for ourselves in order to move forward. Once we commit to the idea that we are capable (question 1), then we begin to look for social proof (question 2) and find stories of people who have achieved change and in whose stories we can see ourselves. The final question, however, is the most important because it’s the one tied to sustained change. It’s also the hardest one to answer because it requires us to contradict that voice in our head that tells us we aren’t worth it.
Lesson #3: Get moving!
Dai reminds us it’s not that humans are emotional, it’s that we are emotional humans. For better or for worse, our emotions dictate our perspective; however, we do have the ability to shift how we feel to positively influence how we think. Moving our body with a specific purpose is an essential step in making that shift.
Importantly, his point is not that everyone needs to go to the gym and start pumping iron. Rather, the kind of movement you introduce into your life can be as simple as taking a walk, gardening, really anything that feels good for your range of movement and pushes the body. Introducing just this one small element into your day can drastically change how you feel and, ultimately, your perspective on your life and what you can achieve.
About Best Places to Lead
Your company has the potential to be great. The leader’s responsibility is to unlock that potential – or doom it to mediocrity.
On the LIVE Best Places to Lead show, you’ll learn the hard-fought lessons from the front lines earned by business leaders who have already had their teeth bashed in and lived to tell about it. We’ll share the tips, tricks, mindsets, and frameworks that allow great leaders to lead differently.
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