Tiny Thinking Habits that Have a Huge Impact

 

If you want to change your life, doing new things, starting new habits, and taking on new behaviors are going to make a huge difference.

What could change your life, even more, is changing the way you think. Working on how you think is just as important as working on what you do.

They go hand in hand. Tiny changes in your thinking can make a huge difference in your life.

Create ease in your life. The next time you are struggling with something in your life that feels more difficult than you think it should be, sit back and ask yourself this question: How could I make this easy?

Making time for your friends, getting through your task lists, setting healthy boundaries — are all things that you can make life really hard or reasonably easy depending on your perspective.

Making time for your friends can sometimes be wildly difficult. It turns into these back and forth text conversations about when to meet, where to meet, what restaurant to meet at. But you can make it easy by organizing a once-a-month date where you all go to someone’s house and bring food.

Getting in movement can also be wildly difficult if you force yourself to wake up at 4 am, go to a gym in an environment that you hate, and do exercises you don’t enjoy. But it can also be easy. Consider parking farther away from places to make sure you’re getting in walking and signing up for dance classes that make you feel happy.

You don’t realize how many things you approach in the hardest way possible until you reflect…

So often we go for the hardest option possible and we’re not aware of it. We don’t know at the moment that we’re picking the hardest option. When you sit back and ask that question (how can I make this easy?), you find obvious solutions that are far easier than whatever you’re trying to do.

This is a little mindset shift that can hugely impact your life.

You’re going to find yourself overcoming weird false expectations that you’ve set on yourself. You’ll move from doing things that you’ve always done one way to a way that feels so much better for you. You’ll also move to simply not doing the things that just don’t need to be done.

Instead of just powering through the difficult, let that question become a go-to question in your mind to create ease in your life.

Create a more intentional life. Ask yourself this question: What’s it all for? Asking this question regularly, whenever you are making decisions, is going to radically change your life.

What’s it all for? What is my business for? What is my relationship for? You can “zoom-out” and ask this question of your life in general or on more specific questions in your life.

If you’re planning a vacation and you ask “what’s it all for?” — and your answer is “to feel refreshed and relaxed”, you’re going to plan a different vacation from someone who wants to feel energized and enthused.

Ask “what is it all for?”. Are you doing the wrong things in your life? Are you getting together with the wrong people?

Make life more enjoyable. The next time you have to do something that you wouldn’t usually enjoy, ask the question “how can I make this more enjoyable?”.

Let’s face it. Some things in life simply aren’t that enjoyable. For me, that is driving in traffic for a long time. But with some tweaks, I can make it more enjoyable. I can choose to put on a podcast or listen to an audiobook that I’ve been wanting to read.

Fun is the aftermath of deliberately manipulating a familiar situation in a new way — Ian Boyett

If you have to do mundane things or you have periods of time doing things that you don’t enjoy, ask yourself “How can I make this more enjoyable?”.

Create a happier life. This is about letting your emotions inform you rather than overwhelm you. When you find that emotions come up you’re bitter, you’re angry, you’re resentful; instead of letting yourself be swallowed by these emotions and sitting in them and wallowing in them, ask yourself the following questions:

What is this emotion trying to inform me?

What is it trying to tell me?

What is the message that it’s sending me?

Resentment is usually trying to tell you that you need to set some kind of boundary in your life. You need to make a change.

Emptiness might be trying to tell you that you haven’t looked at or practiced your values in months.

Frustration might be telling you that you need to have a conversation with someone or that you need to eat or sleep.

The more you get to know your feelings, the easier it becomes to figure out what your emotions are telling you. This is not at all about pushing your emotions away. If anything, you are embracing your emotions and acknowledging their existence.

By paying attention to your body and to how you react to things, paying attention to what works and what doesn’t, then finding little shifts from there, you’ll find a way that works for you.