One of the themes I’ve been exploring in my life is the theme of being better. By being better, I don’t mean being better than someone else, or comparing myself to other people. I’ve done all that before and its not helpful behavior because I find that it actually holds a person back from their greatness.
When I talk about being better, what I really mean is making the choice to improve yourself each day. This choice to improve yourself doesn’t mean you have to make grandiose changes. Rather it means that you pick an area of your life and you make gradual changes that help you get better. Here’s a few examples that may inspire you in your own efforts to be better.
Example 1: I started exercising each morning for 10-15 minutes. I do this each each day, focusing first on stretching and then doing a series of core exercises to help improve my core strength. I have been slowly increasing the time I exercise, and I’ve also used this morning activity to inspire exercise in the evening.
You can take a similar approach with your own physical health. Carve out a specific time of day and start doing stretches and exercises during that time. Initially you might start with 5 minutes and then work on getting to 6 minutes, gradually increasing your time spent exercising.
Example 2: I started working on my posture. My Sifu has been helping me work on my posture. I’ve been using the stretches as well as his instruction and several books to help me do specific exercises each day to straighten my posture out. Each day I spend a few minutes working on these stretches and I am noticing that I am standing taller and feeling more confident as a result.
If you want to work on your posture, have someone look at it with you and then start introducing changes to how you carry yourself. My initial focus was just on standing up straighter, but now its moved over to sitting differently, walking differently, etc. You can do the same by focusing in one specific aspect you want to change and then carry it over to another area you want to improve on.
Example 3: Reading each night. Each night I spend a half hour reading. I make the choice to slow down my evening after I finish writing by taking some time to read. It feeds my mind, gives me something to contemplate and helps me continue the work I am doing. Initially I was only reading for ten minutes and I gradually moved the time up so I was making more time to read.
Each of these examples involves making a commitment to do a specific behavior but it also involves making a time commitment. The time commitment doesn’t have to be lengthy. If you spend 5 minutes doing something that helps you be better than that’s an improvement right there. What you’ll find is that the more you do something, the more easy it becomes to commit to doing it for longer periods of time, and also applying it to other areas of your life.
Being better is really about making incremental changes. The little changes we make create the opportunities for growth and improvement that we want but they make them sustainable! Sustainable change is what enables us to create momentum in our lives around the improvement we want to create for ourselves.
