How to Change Your Life (Even If You Don’t Know Where to Start) | #142
How do you change your life when you don’t even know where to start? In this Daily Dose, resilience coach Dawn Super shares the practical mindset shifts that helped her overhaul her life after decades of hardship. Learn how radical self-acceptance, personal experiments, and the four stages of learning can help you create real change—one step at a time.
Watch the Video Here or Read the Script below
Do you want to change something about your life and you don't know where to start? If so, this video is for you.
Today, I'm talking about how I completely overhauled my life and giving you some concrete ways to get started making big or small changes.
This is the daily dose of Dawn at Dawn videos designed to expand your thinking.
So, why do we want to think about this? Well, not only did I not know how to change my life, I didn't know you could teach yourself things like self-esteem and confidence. I thought you either had them or you didn't.
Welcome into this real conversation about how to create change in your life.
So, I've talked about how I lived an if then life. If this happened, then I could be happy. Well, a lot of those things that were on my list 10 years ago are still there. I just changed the way I interacted with them.
One of the most important things that I learned was radical self acceptance. This is where you're asking yourself the question, "Now what?"
Okay, this thing happened. Now what?
This isn't going away. Now what?
This is never going to get better. Now what?
What are we going to do about it?
Number two, don't be afraid to try stuff, to experiment on yourself. I knew I needed to change things about my personality to be able to maintain healthy friendships.
So, the first thing I worked on was how do I stop doing the yucky things that I'm doing?
What tools can I use?
What tricks can I try to change my behavior to make it different?
I wanted to stop gossiping. So, I stopped talking to people who wanted to gossip. If I did end up in a conversation with them, I excused myself as soon as I could after the gossiping started. Then I started making more friends who just didn't gossip.
My book, How to Be on Your Own Side, is 14 of those key lessons that got me to make the biggest changes in my life distilled down into a book. To teach you how to be on your own side, how to be your own best friend.
One of the tools that I use still to this day is what I call the four stages of learning. I put them on a magnet because I needed to remember that learning does not happen in a one and done. So, the first thing that needs to happen is you need to notice something needs to change.
And I know you've heard that phrase, you can't fix it if you don't know it's broken. So, you need to examine yourself. Use introspection. Be actually honest with yourself, Becky. Take a look at where you might be doing something to contribute to the problem. Notice it.
And then identify some things that you can try to affect change. Like me with the gossip. The best thing that I could do is not talk to people who gossiped. But you don't think about things like that unless you hear them on a video somewhere or you read them in a book or you actually are actively trying to make your life different.
So there's thousands of people on the internet now giving advice just like me, people who had a problem, found a solution, and it worked for them and they're sharing it. And no two people are the same.
So, you might have to listen to a bunch of different creators like I did and pull the information together and make it your own. And that's why it's so important to practice.
So, you hear a strategy you think might work, you practice it. If it works, you keep doing it. If it doesn't work, you can tweak it or look for another kind of strategy to try. And then after all that practice, practice, practice, you become the thing that you are trying to become in the first place.
Nothing happens instantly and some of these things take a while to learn and you might do a little back and a little forward before you finally get it.
I literally ran experiments on myself and I highly highly highly recommend it. If you always do what you always did, you always get what you always got. You may have heard that a hundred times before.
So, how do you use that phrase to change your life? You ask yourself the question, "what happens if I don't?" So, I always do it this way... What happens if I don't do it that way?
I have a whole series of these videos on this YouTube channel, and you can go back and see how much I've grown as a content creator. In the beginning, I rambled a lot, and I didn't have a lot of direction, but the content is still really good. So, if you want to go back and get the lessons, help yourself - truly.
So let's see I did...
What happens if I don't think about my suffering?
What happens if I don't beat myself up?
If I don't accept the judgment of others?
If I don't get caught up in other people's emotions?
If I don't stay in bed hitting that snooze button over and over again.
If I don't wait until I feel better.
So each one of those I spent a month asking myself the question and experiencing the answer. And that's how I went from barely coping to going beyond coping to surviving to thriving. And you can do that too. You have to work on yourself.
You can't take the excuse that you are... this is who you are or this is how you've always been. You're a conglomeration of what you've experienced to this point. So experience new stuff and you'll be a new you every day. The cells in our body replace themselves every 10 years. So you've already been a new person however many decades you've been alive.
So you have every day of your life to learn how to be a human being on Earth school.
So reboot your life, get my book and remember happy matters.
Or get it on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/How-Your-Own-Side-Self-Encouragement/dp/B0F94H61S3
