CE Insight: Making Change Easier

Happy New Year!

As the new year unfolds it's common we focus our attention on how we might choose to change or better ourselves and our lives.

As cliche as this can be, reflection is healthy.

I want to offer some thoughts ways to make change easier instead that have worked well in my life and in clients I work with.

🎯 Two Key Principles

Principle 1. Think in terms of making healthier things you want to do more easier to access/do, and less healthy things you want to do less harder to access/do. Here are a few practical examples.

🚶🏻 At the start of 2023 I wanted to get back into exercising after recovering from burnout. Believe it or not, rigorous activity was not possible as my nervous system capacity didn't allow it.

Instead of making a BIG workout plan, I made things easier by spending a month walking 5 to 10 minutes a day to build the habit. It was EASY to say yes to.

After a month I naturally extended to 20 - 30 minutes a day. Soon I was at 1 hour a day of vigorous walking. In total, I walked over 260 times in 2023 and lost 13 lbs, all starting with a frictionless approach.

🤳 If you want to spend less time on your phone scrolling through social media, delete social media from your phone and only use it on your computer. You could also leave your phone in a room out of sight for hours of the day so it isn't as easy to do. Whatever makes it harder is helpful.

💧 If you want to drink more water, think about getting a large water container you like drinking from and that's easy to bring where you go. If the process of drinking water is more accessible and easy, there will be less friction between you and drinking water. Just filling up a small glass many times can be enough to limit our intake over time.

You can apply this principle to anything you like. Just think about making healthy things easier, more enjoyable, and easier to access, while making unhealthy habits tougher to do. The key here is this principle helps solve the fall off we often experience after a few days or a week or doing something.

Principle 2. Increase self awareness of your body and sensations. Our habits are wired in the brain and body. Often, we push to change the brain but are left fighting the body.

The things we want to change within ourselves can be like addictions to our physical body, not just our brain.

By taking time to become more embodied and aware of our physical body, we can begin to sense and feel our resistances and learn to become more comfortable with riding those waves vs. running away from them.

Typically, the more presence and embodiment we build, the more nervous system capacity we have. This increases our tolerance for change and helps us break habits at a cellular level.

This of course takes time, but it's important to start. There are no quick fixes when it comes to real change.

To help with building a great awareness of your somatic self (body), you might be interested in our ongoing workshop series called Path To Discernment. 

Inside our membership, there are 3 sessions available, with more coming here in 2024.

Check out the series here.

A Few Things Worth Your Attention

1. I'll be relaunching the CE podcast in a couple of weeks. I had taken a break for a while because I was overwhelmed with other business tasks. With those managed, I'm excited to get back into regular conversations. I've already recorded a few and have more coming up! If you want to catch up with some previous episodes, click here.

2. When it comes to solutions in our world, Regenerative Agriculture is a big one to wrap our minds around and embrace. It gives us a better understanding of how to produce food in healthy ways and lets us know why our current mass dieting habits are unnatural and unsustainable, specifically when it comes to nutrition, water usage, soil health and pollution. Learn more about regenerative agriculture here.

3. ChatGPT The Best Journal Ever? I was doing some research on AI and came across something interesting. One guy has been using ChatGPT for his journaling and feels it's one of the best experiences he's had. He of course feels it doesn't replace connecting with real people, but he makes an interesting case in his essay. Check it out.