Ways to Improve Your Life

When it comes to improving your life, it’s common to take drastic measures in hopes of seeing drastic results. However, you don’t need to overhaul your life—and everything about you—to become the person you want to be.

More often than not, it’s about implementing small changes, creating lasting habits, and being consistent with your efforts. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to get your online liberal arts master’s degree or have no desire to go back to school—incorporating the three practices below can help you improve your life.

Implement small changes

If you want to get in better shape, then you might think you have to create a seven-day workout plan and eliminate bad food from your life. That’s not true. You don’t need to make big changes to see big results. In fact, big changes, such as going to the gym seven days a week or trying to write 1,000-plus words a day in your free time when you typically don’t write at all, can lead to burnout, which 40 percent of office workers suffer from.

The key to improving your life and achieving your goals is implementing small changes that you can stick to for long periods of time because these small changes will eventually turn into lasting habits. However, you can’t just write down these goals and changes. You have to put them into the world by taking action.

Create lasting habits

It’s easy to make lofty goals when we’re motivated. It’s hard to follow through with those goals when we’re not. To put things into perspective, more than 90 percent of people fail on their New Year’s resolutions.

When trying to create a new habit, it’s important to create something we can stick to and something that we also want to do. That might sound obvious, but many people try to live and die by what a productivity guru preaches. Not everyone wants to wake up at 4 a.m. and start side projects and you don’t have to if you don’t want to.

Create habits that you believe in and can stick to. For example, if you want to read more, then don’t start with a goal of reading two-plus books a week. Start with 5-30 pages a day.

Consistency is the key, whether you want to go to school and become a pediatric dentist or you want to start up your own marketing business.

Be consistent with your efforts

We live in a day and age in which instant gratification is taking over. Many people don’t want to put in the work—they just want the end results. After all, it’s hard to write a book, get in shape, start and finish a degree, or even improve our lives.

We see someone who has something we want—a better career, more money, better shoes—and we want this something instantly.

Barring a string of extremely good luck, you have to work toward your goals and dreams via being consistent with your efforts. It takes time to achieve success, but you will get there.

Without consistency, your projects won’t grow and you won’t put in enough time to see real results. You won’t improve your life. You have to make small changes and continue to implement them. The moment you revert back to your old habits, the moment your life goes back to where it used to be.

With consistency, you will create habits and also chip away at your goals. Your life will become everything you wanted it to be.

There are many ways to improve your life, but implementing small changes, creating lasting habits, and being consistent with your efforts should take place during your journey to a better you.