RULE TO BREAK

“Take one step at a time”

If you’re trying to write a book, as I’ve learnt over the years, the prospect can be daunting. So the best approach is to tackle it in small chunks. One chapter at a time (or in my case, one Rule). ‘Eat an elephant one bite at a time’, as they say. That works for writing reports or dissertations too. And it works for renovating a car or refurbishing a house. Little by little is an effective approach to most practical projects.

However, if you want to make major changes to your life, it’s not the way to go about it. Sure, you can tweak the smaller dissatisfactions to make modest improvements, but for the big stuff, you can’t pussyfoot around. You have to jump.

Suppose, for example, that you’re not happy with your weight. If you want to lose a few pounds, you can adjust your diet to shave off a few calories here and there, and you should achieve your new weight quite easily. But if you want to lose a couple of stone or more – and keep it off – you’re going to have to rethink your long-term diet completely. You can’t simply skip the odd snack. You’ll need to cut out bread and potatoes, eat massively more fruit and vegetables, and keep firmly away from fast food outlets. Your shopping habits will have to change, and the inside of your fridge will look like, well, the inside of someone else’s fridge. Not just while the weight is coming off, but for good if you want it to stay off.

Suppose you don’t like your job. You could apply for a transfer, or move to another company. But what if you realize you’re unhappy with your career? Maybe you’ve realized you don’t want to be an accountant any more. Your passion – you now realize – is to be a tree surgeon. If you really want to succeed in this, you’ll need to adapt to a new working regime, a very different salary level, a new diet (you can’t support an active, outdoorsy tree surgeon on a sedentary desk worker’s diet), and quite possibly a new social life as well. The move isn’t going to work unless you embrace it wholeheartedly, and welcome the changes it brings.

An old friend of mine had an office job in London. She was generally dissatisfied with her life and felt she was going nowhere. She’d always had the idea of living in the country rather than the city, but never found an opportunity. So she made her own opportunity. She gave in her notice, found herself a cottage in a little country village, and started up her own business. Now some people might think that changing so many things at once was foolhardy. But she succeeded largely because she had thrown everything up in the air and made a fresh start.

Another friend found that none of his relationships lasted more than a couple of years. Eventually, after one more failure, he recognized that he was putting his work before his partner every time. So he changed to a related but less stressful job, and booked some counselling sessions. He soon met a lovely woman and this time he approached his life from the other direction entirely. He put the relationship first, and really worked at it. It felt very different, but it eventually became habit and several years on they’re still very happily together.

I’ve known people move abroad, end relationships, change careers, take a massive salary drop – and I’ve observed that these big changes, so long as they’re well thought through, seem to work far more often than trying to effect big change without doing things very differently.