If you’re procrastinating, unmotivated, feeling hopeless, living a little too much on Netflix or social media, or feeling that your life is in a stasis where the same kind of day keeps repeating itself, then this article is for you.

Change does not need to be complicated, technical, or follow a model; it starts with powerful and simple honesty, will, and hope.

These are the four steps:

1. Map your territory
2. Find your north star
3. Repent and accept your sacrifice (more on that later) 
4. Begin the journey

Map your Territory

Make some time and space to sit or lay calmly to explore your life as a whole: what is dissatisfying you, what behaviours could change, are you where you want to be? Look at work, lifestyle, relationships, and your inner life.

Being honest with yourself and being willing to look at the darker side of your current situation, see it for what it is and accepting it, is a key transition point; your mind and your heart are aligning and out of that alignment will come the proper impetus to change your situation.

The dissonance between the heart and mind is what keeps people stuck; it’s okay to not be where you want to be, so many people are in the same situation. In this self-honesty, you can be with every emotion that comes up, including grief, anger and shame; now is the time to listen to them all, see where you are, and find acceptance.

Understand too, that the difficult and repetitive patterns and habits that you have serve a beneficial purpose for you. On the whole they may not help you, but they do something for you so that you get something you might feel to be lacking: that could be connection, access to positive or comfortable feelings, or courage to name a few things. 

Find your north star

In short, define everything that you desire across the themes of your life; feel free to be honest, ambitious and outrageous!

This is your vision, it is okay that it may change over time as life does have a way of re-aligning our plans; however, calibrating this north star while you move towards it, is a dynamic combo for finding constant motivation that aligns with your heart now and taking the unpredictable journey — hardly anyone truly knows where they are going or what they are doing, it’s just crucial to allow and follow our desires at each turn.

Believe in the possiblity of change; giving chance a chance is a prerequisite for transformation to occur.

Repent and accept your sacrifice

This wording sounds dramatic, but it brings home a key point about change. Sacrifice and repenting are deep ideas baked into the human psyche, and they can serve us! Here’s how.

You now can clearly see the contrast between your territory and where you want to go; the situation now, and how you’d like it to be in the future. Of course, you may have seen this discrepancy for some time and feel frustrated by feelings of stuckness. 

You now have an understanding of the feelings, thoughts and behaviours that are sustaining your current situation, and intuitively you’re going to know how they would need to change to align with your desired future.

Out of this contrast, you can accept and embrace your involvement in your own situation; people that don’t change are people that fully outsource responsibility onto others. Self-responsibility is the repentance. 

The sacrifice is this; old parts of you, such as identities, stories and attachments will need to die to make way for the birth of new versions and parts of you. By burning the rotted or old wood in us and cleansing ourselves, new ways of living and doing can emerge from within us.

This is symbolised by stories like the death and resurrection of Christ, or the death and rebirth of Gandalf the Grey into Gandalf the White. Christ went to the underworld, as did Gandalf when he wrestled with the Balrog into the abyss; the process I have described here is this embracing the darkness of our own situation, going to ‘hell’, and out of it, a purifying honesty, acceptance, and belief in change, comes the personal rebirth that is symbolised in these powerful stories.

Begin the Journey

You have found a new inner clarity and alignment, now to take the first steps. Start small if you need to; it really adds up. 30 minutes on something per day, amounts to 182.5 hours across a year! Begin by making a list of things you can do to ‘move the needle’ and start doing them.

Maintain your belief in change; affirm to yourself and keep faith that you can manifest your desires and change your behaviours and beliefs. It will come. Gradually, you will build empowering habits of doing and being that stick; focus on the process over the result.

There will likely be peaks and slumps, its baked into our reality to work in waves like this: you see it in economic and social cycles, as well as biologically and physically in the arising, abiding and decline of all life and energy forms at all levels. So when there are relapses and pauses, take heart to maintain your commitment however you can; the overall trend will go upwards, as long as you don’t give up!

I hope this can be of help to you on your journey; now is always a great time to embrace our desires, face our fears and to live life with an open, loving and hopeful attitude.

Kyle