Small Changes

I was watching an animated review on You Tube this week about a book called The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson and found it interesting as it links into one of our company by-lines, ‘small changes create big results’ but looks at in a slightly different way.

He describes how a choice we make today for example in relation to something we drink or eat won’t make any great difference to how we are tomorrow but if that were a poor choice, for example a soft drink rather than a glass of water and we did that every day, it would build up over time and have an negative impact on our overall health.

It would be easy to choose the water, but we tell ourselves that having this one soft drink won’t make us an unhealthy person in one day and so it’s also easy not to choose the water. That one small decision doesn’t really matter and yet it does; if we continued to do that every day for a year the effects would be noticeable.

The opposite is also true. If we choose to have the water instead and make that choice every day then the positive effects would also be noticeable and this applies to other things too.

For example, if you were studying and finding a particular textbook overwhelming, you could decide to read a few pages every day and kept that up over a year and if you did, you would have read a lot of pages and probably many other text books. Reading a few pages won’t make you an expert on that topic overnight but over time it would.

Yet if something’s easy to do then it’s also easy not to do and being human we often take the ‘not do’ option. Each small decision we make doesn’t matter and it’s all that matters. It’s the sum of all our daily choices, that create our long-term results and leads us where we are today.

Little things matter. Small decisions move us towards our future and if we’re clear about where we are going and who we want to be, a desired future state, then we need to ask ourselves ‘will this choice help me get there?’ If the answer is no, we may sometimes choose to do that anyway and it’s important to consider the impact of that choice. If the answer is yes, we will find ourselves where we want to be sooner than expected and that would be awesome wouldn’t it?

If we're clear about our desired future state then every thought we create, every decision we make and every action we take should be aligned to that.  Are yours leading you towards or away from what you truly want?

Rowena Hardy - Facilitator, Coach and Partner, Minds Aligned