Next week sees me celebrating another birthday but I have reached a time in my life when birthdays don’t mean much anymore. When I was a child I remember longing to be 16 so I could leave school and go to college, then 18 so I could be an adult. I always seemed to be wishing my life away and imagining the amazing things I thought would happen in the future. With age has come experience and I know now that change doesn’t happen because you get older but because you make it happen.
My recent decision to change my lifestyle and opt for healthier foods and increase the amount of exercise that I do was a recognition of the fact that I won’t wake up one day slim and that if I want to avoid diabetes, cancer and heart conditions I need to be proactive and make changes myself. This has been a big decision and has meant spending more time on considering what we will eat as a family each week and proactively finding time to exercise. After years of prioritising the children’s needs ahead of my own it seems odd to be taking time back for myself and I sometimes feel selfish but then I look at what a small amount of time that is and consider whether my children would rather I take that time to go on the exercise bike or take a walk now or whether they would rather spend it at my bedside in hospital later. I am learning to accept that my kids are old enough to do many things themselves; soon they will be out living their own lives and that, although I will always be there for them, I think I have to start looking at changes I need to make in my life to end up where I want to be.
Making changes can seem daunting and although people say you should break down change into manageable chunks to make it seem more achievable I think it can sometimes be difficult to know where to start. I’m quite indecisive and I worry that I will take the right ‘course’ in life sometimes so I have decided that I am going to apply the 1% rule to everything I want to change.
The 1% rule states that if you put 1% more effort into 1 thing a day then in a year you will have developed 365% as a person. One day you might decide to spend 1% longer studying or put 1% more effort into exercising. You may want to commit to saving 1% more a month; if you increased your savings by 1% a month for a year you would soon see a marked difference. There are so many things you can apply this to; 1% less time on your phone each day, 1% more time writing letters to friends, 1% reading the news or networking.
There are some things in life I would like; to stay happily married, for my kids to be happy, to lose weight and be healthy and to progress in my career so that I am able to invest more money in my pension and create a rainy day fund. Those things can seem huge tasks and its not always clear how to get where you need to be in life but if I can improve myself by 1% a day then I hope that I will eventually become the person I want to become, with the resources I need to have to get by.
ohanameans 