Being Better – In 4 Easy Steps

Are you tired of being less than you know you can be? Are you thinking about how you could be better? As you’re here reading this blog post I’m pretty sure it’s been on your mind.

Are you a bit of a self-development junkie like me or are you just feeling less than you know you can?

Sometimes there are things we want to change about ourselves because we can see that they aren’t working. We might be hanging onto something, but we really know deep inside of ourselves that it needs to go. Other times we can’t see the wood for the trees, we know life isn’t working for us but we don’t know where to start.

Personal growth isn’t just about learning. We can devour every resource that we can lay our hands on but if we don’t implement, at least some of what we’ve learned, we may as well not have bothered.

We can spend a lot of time absorbing information from a multitude of different sources: blog posts, books, podcasts, magazines, and videos, but unless we take steps to really implement what you’ve learned in a sustained way, very little happens.

I said Four Easy Steps and I meant it. Don’t worry I’m not going to get you to look at your whole life and address each and every area. Just pick one. The most important one. The one that is keeping you awake at night or sending you to the refrigerator when you aren’t even hungry.

Take that one thing, where you know you can do better, where you’re motivated to be better, and implement these four steps. Nail them. Then you simply rinse and repeat in whatever part of your life needs attention. Are you ready? Here we go: – WDEP

1 = What do you want?

2 = What are you Doing to get it?

3 = Evaluate

4 = Plan

1. What Do You Want?

Write it down as clearly and succinctly as you can.

When you believe that you aren’t being the best that you can be, it’s because you are making a comparison between how you see yourself, and how you would like to see yourself. The first thing to ask yourself is how realistic your picture is?

This picture of how you want to be is part of what is called your Quality World in Choice Theory.  The Quality World is like an album of all the things that you believe are necessary for you to be happy. Sometimes these ideas are just not realistic and this can lead to a lot of stress. Changing or even tweaking some of your Quality World pictures can help you to work towards things that are achievable.

This could be as simple as changing your dream of being a full-time professional singer to accepting that you might be happy singing Saturday nights in a local bar. You could still keep our nice secure job that pays the mortgage and keeps the kids in designer sports shoes.

When you are thinking about What you want it’s also important to consider Why you want it. The Why is important for ongoing motivation. It also saves you from charging down a rabbit hole to find that it wasn’t at all what you thought it would be and that it doesn’t make you happy after all.

There is one more thing to consider in the What and that is perception. People see things differently all the time, in fact, rarely do two people see things in the same way.

People leave relationships all the time because they think that their partner doesn’t love them. It could just be their perception. Their partner might not demonstrate love in the way that their Quality World picture and their Love Language thinks love should look like. This is just one example of how your perception may not be serving you. In this kind of situation changing your perception can go a long way to being better.

So look at your What very carefully and consider whether it is realistic and whether your perception of the situation is valid. If not you’ll create a lot of unnecessary unhappiness and stress for yourself.

2. What are you Doing?

What are you doing to get what you want? Wanting without doing is dreaming, so write down everything you are doing to get what you want.

3. Evaluate

Evaluate the effectiveness of what you are doing to get what you want. Make sure that you are not trying to control someone else to get what you want because the only person that you can control, or that you should try to control, is yourself.

4. Plan

After you’ve evaluated the effectiveness of what you are trying to do to be the best you can be you can make a plan moving forward. This should include continuing what’s working and changing what’s not working.

Choices

In the end, everything boils down to the choices we make. We can’t control everything but we can control ourselves and that’s actually plenty. We have opportunities to make choices each and every day about what we do. Ask yourself next time you are reaching for a piece of cake or thinking about driving through MacDonalds: Is this being the best I can be?

Don’t expect perfection, no one is perfect, and your best is always a point on your own particular continuum. If you ate takeaways five days a week and you can cut it down to twice a week, that might be the best you can do right now. But making that choice not to drive through five days will strengthen your resolve and your resilience so that in the future you might be able to save takeaways for a once a month treat.

Please leave a comment below sharing what you are going to do to be your best.

As always if you have any questions, comments, or feedback I would love to hear from you in the comments below. Your comments help others by your sharing and they also help this post to rank in Google where people can find it amongst all the online noise. So if this is something you think is valuable please take the time to leave a comment below before you go.

Thanks again

Deb🌻