Improve Your Life with a Simple Change

"End your day as a better person than when you started it"

- Dr Jordan Peterson

There is so much within the topic of self-improvement that I can go on all day and have only scratched the surface. However, there are a few main factors successful people put into place that a lot of people do not even consider doing. As an introduction, I will briefly discuss what I and many psychologists consider to be the main life-changing point anyone can easily implement to improve their life.

There are many times throughout your life when you will sit back and ponder what you have achieved and contemplate possible futures. But how do you plan on actually achieving them? This may seem like such a broad question and there are thousands of videos and websites with lists upon lists of supposed answers. However, Psychology has a very simple answer and it starts with your daily routine.

A common practice in life is to create a plan for your future. To set obtainable goals that will either improve your life or bring you some form of happiness. This can be a five-year plan for a work promotion, degree completion or a ten-year plan for a new home, either way, we set these future targets to have something to aim towards and give our life a certain directional purpose. Yet statistically, most people fail.

So, what do most people miss?

In short, to effectively improve your life, you need a plan for your plan. Seems odd to read so allow me to explain. To use me as an example, my five-year plan was to become a psychologist with a focus on Neuroenhancement. To do this, I enrolled at university studying Psychology and Psychotherapy degree which is a 4.5-year course. This is a five-year plan and sounds great as a future goal, but for me to truly exceed and make something from that then I quickly learned I need to do one thing. Improve who I am, as a person, as a whole. And to do this required one simple life change.

Each morning before you start anything, just take a minute to sit down and write out a quick bullet point list of what your goals for the day are and what times you plan to achieve them. This may seem overly simple but there is a significant amount of psychology happening within such a small process that impacts the rest of your day.

Mine generally looks like this:

. Complete 'x' contract at work by 12 pm

. Have a healthy dinner with a piece of fruit

. Ensure 'x' and 'x' case studies are revised by 5:30 pm (home time)

. Workout at the gym till 6:30 pm

. Get home and relax for 30 minutes (generally reading a fantasy novel or catching up with family/ friends)

. Hoover and tidy around

. 30 minutes reading psychology magazine (or website blog updates)

. 15 minutes meditating

. 30 minutes writing a story (or an article such as this one)

Most of your daily tasks are autonomous and the pride of accomplishment is lost. By writing even simple things such as doing the dishes, hoovering up, doing that dusting that you have been putting off etc, then ticking them off each time you have done, has a deep psychological impact on the mind and reignites the feeling of accomplishment within the general day to day tasks. Set yourself a reward for when you are done to truly cement that feeling of completing the targets.

When you schedule your day out then you can see what time you have spare. Each day, set yourself 15 to 30-minutes of time as a target to do something that promotes growth or helps towards your long-term goal. For me, this is either to read up on the latest psychology papers or take some time to learn a new language (client demographic dependant). In reference to the quote from Jordan Peterson, always end your day as a better person than when you started.

If you spend the day floating through it, not really accomplishing anything or learning anything new then all you have done is waste it. Unfortunately, this is how most people live their lives. They plod through generic tasks without a goal in mind, no satisfaction in their achievements, and then sit down and get lost within the realms of TV or social media. Each day that you live like this is another day you fall behind on yourself. Take a moment to contemplate everything you have procrastinated on and remember the stress, feeling of being overwhelmed, and general disappointment. What if you flip that around? What if each day, you as a person grew in some way, even just a little bit? What would you know and what skills could you have to exceed in life in five years?

Simply by taking five minutes in the morning to set yourself genuine and achievable daily tasks that have a positive impact on your life and then accomplish them, you will then be a little better at the end of the day. Then the next day, you grow a little more, and the day after that, and so on. This daily cycle will ensure that you continuously grow as a person in the direction that you want to move. A small change that yields very big rewards.

I hope this helps you move forward with a clearer direction and motivation. I will be posting a variety of psychology-based research along with random fantasy stories so please subscribe and like to help promote the content so other people can also improve their life.