How to Grow Your Life, Starting from Zero

Self-improvement? No, not again. Please.

I hear you. These days, you can’t open a book, magazine, or web browser without finding something about “fulfilling your potential” or even “How to ‘Mindfully Hustle’ Your Way to Millions and Never Burn Out” (which, no kidding, is the actual subject line for an email I got recently).

So…why this article?

I’m a therapist who is constantly thinking about and researching human behavior and how the brain works. For the past five years, I’ve been trying to answer one of the most essential questions a therapist can ask:

Is there a better way to help people improve their lives, even when they think they can’t?

The answer is yes.

I’ve created a program, called Making Change Doable (MCD), for improving your life. This program

• works
• makes sense
• is built on solid ideas and research
• (and most important) is doable

Is it something that you can use in a variety of ways to make your life better? Almost certainly, yes.

Benefits of the MCD program

You can use MCD to

• develop new skills
• get significant work done
• achieve important goals
• improve how you see yourself and the world

And doing these things will help you pursue three things that people want: happiness, success, and a meaningful life.

Is there a better way to help people improve their lives?

Just as important, MCD solves three common problems that may be sabotaging you today:

• believing that you can’t change
• not wanting to get started
• giving up before you get the results you want

I’ve already written about all the pieces of the MCD program. This article puts them together in the right order. After reading it, you’ll be able to judge whether this program is truly doable and whether it’s something you want to try.

However, this article is just an overview. Before you can use this program, you absolutely must read the articles pointed to in this article.

Three qualities of self-improvement methods

Let’s be real.

No method of self-improvement is truly fast, but some are faster than others. Keep this in mind when I use the term fast in this article.

No method of self-improvement is truly easy, but some are easier than others. I’ll simplify things by using the term easy instead.

And it must be said that some programs of self-improvement don’t work, while others are unrealistic or impractical. I’ll use the term doable for the ones that work.

You can’t have all three qualities together. Here are the three cases that cover all the possibilities in the real world:

Unicorn: Let’s get the easiest case out of the way. If a program of self-improvement claims to be fast and easy, then it cannot be doable. Like the unicorn, “fast, easy, and doable” is a seductive fantasy, but you won’t find it in this world.

Race car: Next comes fast and doable. This is the realm of superior willpower, skill, and endurance. It’s possible to reach your goals this way. Like driving a race car, it’s fast but it’s not easy. In fact, it’s hard, and it takes a lot out of you.

Stairs: MCD makes change as easy as possible. Like climbing a flight of stairs, it’s doable, but it’s not fast.

(Another metaphor for the doable-but-not-fast Making Change Doable program is what happens at the gym when you want lift a very heavy weight. You can’t do it immediately, but you can get there by starting small and building yourself up over a period of time.)

Some programs of self-improvements don’t work, while others are unrealistic or impractical

There are plenty of places you can go to learn about Unicorn and Racecar self-improvement (though doing so is a waste of time).

Keep reading to learn about the Making Change Doable program of achievement and self-improvement.

It’s as easy as climbing the stairs, and it’s doable.

You are already on your way

The Making Change Doable program starts out with good news: Even if you think you cannot, you have the skills to change your life:

• Change can happen. (Aren’t you different from who you were 10 years ago?)
• You can control your actions. (Ever gone to work or school even when you didn’t feel like it?)
• You have what it takes to achieve goals that require time and effort. (Have you ever graduated from school? Been hired for a job that requires specific skills?)

Read “3 Undeniable Facts Prove That You Can Make Your Life Better”. Think about what it says. Read it until you convince yourself that you do have the skills you need to improve your life.

Change your attitude, change your world

You may have grown up thinking something like, “I’m just not good at math. Either you have it or you don’t, and I don’t.” This is called a fixed mindset.

Fortunately, that’s not true.

People who have a growth mindset say things like, “I’m not limited by what I’m naturally good at. I know I can get better at math if I keep studying and practicing it.”

People with a growth mindset know they can improve with work and time

40 years of research by Stanford professor Carol Dweck proves that the growth mindset exists and that you can change from the fixed mindset to the growth mindset. By adopting the growth mindset, you can accomplish more, be more successful (which increases your happiness), and lead a more meaningful life.

Read “Become More Successful, Happier with One Small Change―Backed by Science.” Then ask yourself: Is this true? and What does this mean for me?

The truth you must know in your bones

Friction. If you want to move something, you have to push.

Gravity. If you want to lift something, you have to strain against the weight.

Effective effort. If you want to improve your life, you have to make an effective effort over a period of time. This is the key element of Making Change Doable (and a key insight about life).

The good news is that all of these are doable, and that the effort required is proportional to the size of the task. In other words, the road to success is only as long as the goal is high.

How to understand this truth

Were the Beatles an overnight success?

Many people think so, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Read “Are You More Like the Beatles or a Garage Band?,” which tells the little-known story of how the Beatles becames the Beatles. It’s fun to tell your friends this story because of the OMG response it provokes.

Next, read “Why You’re Not Happier (And What You Can Do About It).” It uses the events in the Beatles article to point out several important lessons you can use to move forward in the face of difficulties.

This second article is the one you need to read and reread until you understand in your bones that it is true. You may not believe it now, but knowing this truth will actually make your life easier.

Unpacking the Making Change Doable program

I call Making Change Doable a program because it’s not just a technique. It’s a combination of attitude change, a core technique, and the powerful tools you gain from performing the technique.

MCD combines an attitude change, as well as a core technique and the tools that come from it

The three topics so far (“you can change,” “growth mindset,” and “effort continuing over time”) make up the attitude change.

To gain this attitude change, you absolutely must do two things:

• You must buy into the articles pointed to above, and
• You must act on what they say

This is not unicorn country. MCD lives firmly in the climb-the-stairs, practice-lifting-the-weights world that you live in.

How I discovered the core technique

About a year ago, the image came to me of a person training to lift heavier and heavier weights.

So I thought, when it comes to changing your life, maybe it makes sense to start small.

This thought led me to write “You Can Change — Here’s How to Start.” This article talks about “the world’s smallest change,” an action that you already do, but changed slightly — for example, changing which hand you use to hold the soap when you bathe.

The overall experience of making a change is as follows:

• At first it feels uncomfortable
• As you keep doing it, it feels okay, but you still have to remember to do it
• Eventually, it feels natural, and you’re doing it without thinking about it

My idea at the time was to give you an experience of what change looks like (feels uncomfortable, feels okay, feels natural). By continuing to perform slightly larger tasks, you would eventually be able to make truly useful changes.

But it turns out that the path to useful change was shorter than I had thought.

Over time, making a change feels uncomfortable, then okay, then natural

Before I wrote “You Can Change — Here’s How to Start,” I had already made a few of these small changes. I got a kick out of watching my behavior changing so easily (it wasn’t hard at all), so I kept doing it.

Two behavior changes, then three, then four….

Then something crazy happened.

How the core technique works

You’ll find the details of what I learned in “How A Tiny Habit Can Stop You From Feeling Stuck.” Here’s a summary (and this is the key to the technique):

In the process of learning a new skill, you go through the sequence of feels uncomfortable, feels okay, feels natural.

And you think, So what?

You do a second small change. You don’t notice the sequence (feels uncomfortable, feels okay, feels natural), but it still happens.

And you think, No change — I’m wasting my time.

(This is the moment where you must resist the idea of quitting. You’ll see why soon.)

You go through the process (feels uncomfortable, feels okay, feels natural) with a third small change.

After a few more “practice” changes, you don’t think anything in particular when the change begins to feel natural. This is because the very act of making a change is beginning to feel natural.

Then one day you’re out in the world, not even thinking about small changes, and you’re doing something they way you’ve always done it.

But something has changed. The old way doesn’t work anymore.

You’re irritated. You complain to yourself, “Oh, great! Now I’m going to be irritated every time this happens. I want things to be like they were before!” (Sound familiar?)

Unexpectedly, you find yourself saying, “Why not do it the new way?”

Then — and this is the crazy part — a voice from out of nowhere says: Why not just go ahead and do it a new way? You know how to change.

What just happened?

When you practice a single small change over and over, you learned that at first it feels uncomfortable, then it feels okay, then it feels natural.

So what should happen when you practice small change #1, then small change #2, then small change #3…?

You know the answer.

At first, going through the process of making a change in your life should feel uncomfortable, then it should feel okay, then it should feel natural.

Knowing how to change so well that it is a part of who you are is an extremely important skill.

The first tool: the ability to change

Here is the Big Win of the core technique:

By making a handful of small, easy changes:

• you learn how to change
• you lose your fear of making changes
• the ability to change becomes part of who you are

The result? You will start making changes in your life.

Don’t stop doing the “world’s smallest change” exercise multiple times just because doing so seems pointless, or because you “feel funny” spending your time doing them. (Actually, they only add a few seconds to your day.)

MCD teaches you how to change so well that it becomes a part of who you are

These exercises are essential. They provide an easy, doable path to getting your hands on the only Big Win tool there is: knowing how to change, and knowing it so well that it is part of who you are.

The second tool: make a habit, grow the habit

Remember the “lifting a heavy weight” example I gave earlier?

Many times, people fail in creating a new positive habit because the desired habit is just too “heavy” for them to do at first.

Here is the second tool:

• Start with the smallest version possible of the habit. Practice that for a while. As you are doing this, you are establishing the habit itself without the friction of doing actual work.
• Once you have firmly established the habit, you can make the work done inside the habit a bit “bigger.” Do only as much work as you feel like in that moment. The longer you continue this gradual growth, the more useful your habit becomes.

You may be interested in: “3 Steps to Conquering That Work You’ve Been Hiding From (Backed by Science),” which uses parts of MCD to accomplish a specific task, namely doing that work that you just can’t get started on. Why not take a look?

How to make self-help books useful

Making Change Doable is a great program for making those self-help books and articles that never work start working for you. It gives you

• the attitude change that you need to be successful
• the confidence that comes from repeated successes in changing your behavior
• the tools you need to make your life better, starting from where you are right now

A tiny habit is easier to make — only then do you add work “inside” it

Once you have the two tools of MCD in hand, go back and read the self-help advice. Start implementing that advice using what you know now. Self-help advice is now something you can use.

What MCD means for you

Most self-improvement techniques fail because they don’t address the fact that change is hard.

Making Change Doable works because it

• prepares you to be successful
• provides powerful tools you can use in different ways to improve your life
• delivers clear directions on how to proceed, every step of the way

No matter what you want to do with your life, you can use MCD to become happier, achieve more, and lead a more meaningful life.

It works for me, and it will work for you.