How to Change Your Life in 6 Months: The Basic but Unexpected Tools

Use them and watch everything change.

Your life sucks.

It’s boring, it’s uneventful, you’re poor and fat and your wife hates you.

Oh, I’m sorry, is that just me? No, it’s not. It’s us.

It’s you.

But what if you only had the next 6 months to change your life or not do it at all? What if right from the moment you started reading this article, the clock started ticking and you can no longer wait for Mondays to start dieting, for sunny days to start running and for New Year’s to issue resolutions?

Change will not come if we wait for some other person, or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek. (Barack Obama)

Are you seeking change? Good! Because you just found it. And any successful change starts with getting the most difficult part out of the way.

Know what you want.

It’s very difficult to know what you truly want. A lot of people don’t know themselves and are oblivious to their own desires. They have buried their personalities so deep underneath mountains of societal routines and peer pressure that it’s difficult to get to their true feelings.

I’ve been a life and relationships coach for years and every time I sit down to counsel someone, we inevitably get stuck on the same question: ‘what do you want?

You’d be surprised how many people have no real idea about what they truly desire.

I will get answers like: ‘I want to raise a family with a good man’, but she spends her life being a side-chick to bad men. That’s a classic example of not knowing your own wishes. If your actions and your words are in contradiction, guess who’s right? That’s correct, the actions! They are the ones that show you what you really want. In the case above, what she wants is to convince emotionally unavailable men that she is worthy of their love. An endeavor that will fail every time.

In my case, I keep saying I want a fit slender body but I never ever make time to exercise. Not even 10 squats a day. I just don’t do it. Those are my actions and they speak louder than my words. Although a fit body would be nice, it’s way nicer for me to lie in bed writing all day long. That’s what I truly want, despite what my brain tells me I do.

This brings us to the second point.

Decide if you’re willing to pay the price.

You have to pay a price for everything. Even for the bad choices.

If you are willing to pay the price of looking good, which is working out, pushing yourself through pain and discomfort, and tailoring your meals to fit your goals, you will get the reward of a beautiful body.

If you aren’t willing to pay that price, there is still a price to pay, in the form of jiggly blubber and heavy breathing after every flight of stairs.

You pay for everything anyway. The only difference is that in some cases you pay upfront, while in others you pay after the fact. It’s like using a credit card. When you spend your days on the sofa slurping on milk shakes, you get the product now and pay months or even years later.

The product is chilling for hours in a sugary daze. The price: cellulite and diabetes.

When you work out like a maniac and your dinner every night is made up of 3 chickpeas and 5 salad leaves, you pay before you get your product. You pay for weeks, months, and sometimes years before you see the results that you want.

The price: salad. The result: hotness.

That’s one more reason why knowing what you truly want is so important. The price can be quite steep and you pay it before you get a chance to even see the product.

But once you made the decision, it’s time to act. Proceed with care, though.

Take very small steps.

Here’s where a lot of us unwittingly make a crucial mistake and ruin our chances to fulfill our dreams.

We want it all. Now. Or if possible yesterday. So we do it all at once.

We’re starting with everything from day 1. 300 squats? Yes, sir, can I do another 50, sir?!

Eating nothing but grilled wind with a side of gluten-free steamed hunger? Yes, and I can do a 3-day-fast on top of that too!

One week later, you’re back on your couch, munching on your lost hopes and dreams.

The lesson is: take it easy! Slowly switch from being an apathetic couch potato to being a lazy slob. It might sound like no big difference. Maybe for the world, it’s not. But for you it is. The apathetic couch potato does not move from the couch the whole weekend. The lazy slob is just lazy, but he can still be bothered to drag a huge bottle to his mouth and gulp down a gallon of water a day to hydrate his fluffy body. See? Progress!

The point is: don’t start with 300 squats a day just because your favorite fitness influencer did it yesterday. Can’t you see she can crack nuts with her buttocks? You’ll be cracking your skull trying to get out of bed the next day.

Start with 10 squats a day. Advance to 20 next week.

Read 1 page a day. Continue with 2 next week.

Publish 2 articles per week. Continue with 3 next week.

You get the drill.

I know you want it fast, but fast is actually the slowest way you can go.

Because you give up. Burn out, overwhelm and need for comfort will creep up on you and make you quit.

Build resilience and then go hardcore. If you try it from the start, you will fail. Because you are not hardcore, you’re flabby fluffy softcore. And it’s ok. You’ll get there if you just keep walking, one day at a time.

However, sometimes the road is not as straightforward as putting one step in front of the other. Sometimes you need a leap of faith or a step sideways. But how do you know which to do when?

Use this simple 1-question-process:

Is this helping me towards my goals?

At first, it will be annoying and time-consuming. Then you’ll get used to it, it will become second nature and soon you’ll know without even asking yourself.

Imagine this scenario: it’s Friday night. You’ve had a very hard week and you’ve been such a good boy, eating right meal after meal. Your senses are craving a pizza and your salivary glands agree: pizza!

This is the time when you ask the question: “Does this pizza serve my weight loss goals?”

Answer: “Hahahahha! Nope!”

Cravings and human nature can take it one step further though: “But if I never allow myself one moment of indulgence it will be very difficult to stick with the plan!”

Question: “True. But is Friday dinner when you decided to have your cheat meal of the weak?”

Answer: “Nope! Your cheat meal is on Saturday night, so the pizza would be going against your life-changing goals.”

The answer is clear: you can eat pizza the next night. Tonight you can go hug your cat.

This approach is very useful and successful if you figured out what you truly want for yourself and you decided to go for it.

However, there is one dark ugly monster waiting around the corner to trip you up and make you fall mouth first into a cupcake: addiction!

Ditch addiction.

I couldn’t overstate this enough.

Getting rid of addiction is crucial to changing your life.

Addiction is a universal enemy. We are all affected by it. In one way or another, it touches all our lives with its negative vibe.

You could be addicted to anything: food, sex, alcohol, cigarettes, love, video games, starting virtual fights on social media, pricking church-goes with pins, literally anything.

Anything that can provide escapism, relief, pleasure.

But try as you might, you won’t escape the pain of your life by ingesting one more Fentanyl. On the contrary, you go deeper into despair. It’s just a mirage because the first Fentanyl was so amazing. But the next ones never compare. You’re chasing an imaginary dragon that you never catch.

When you eat a second cupcake, you get nothing of the pleasure you were hoping for. The pleasure is rather in the anticipation of the pleasure of eating the cupcake. Driving home with it in the passenger seat, while its sweet aroma fills up the whole car, salivating at the thought of its velvety delicious goodness touching your tongue.

And you do it, you go for it, you dig in and after the first one or two bites, you feel nothing. Not the exceptional taste, not the texture you craved. You’re just shoving it down yourself in a craze. You get nothing.

There is something you can get though. If you want to make sure that you have no other way but to change your life and go for the one you really crave, there is one extreme thing you can get.

Get the fear

Remember ‘Friends’, the sitcom? Rachel really wants to work in fashion and her good pal Joey tells her that’s never going to happen if she sticks to her old job. He advises her to quit her waitress job and ‘get the fear’. What is the fear?

The fear is going savage on yourself.

Quitting your only source of income when you have no chance of making rent without it. And start working on your dream.

The fear is the force that will make you or break you. It will make you change your life whether you want it or not, or drive you to your knees and make you get back to your sad 9-to-5 existence.

The fear feels like survival mode after you’ve been walking through the desert without water and you get a sudden bout of schizophrenia.

The fear is going for your dreams like your life depends on it. Because it does. Your real life, a life worth living, depends on the fulfillment of your soul’s desires.

I wouldn’t advise it to the faint of heart. Or to most people. Actually, I would advise it as the last step in case you tried everything else and did not fail but succeeded marvelously at them all.

Fear is the last resort between Yourself and Your Master Self.

The best of you is just one fear away.

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