When people want to change their habits, it is common to start is by researching all the different options. They find products that say they can help. They find experts who have the best methods and programs. The effort that is dedicated to the research starts to feel pretty good. The research is movement. The studying is progress. At least that is how it feels.

The reality is that many people never make it past the research phase.

The right question to ask is not about what products or which guru, the correct question is: How do I start making significant change in my life?

The answer that I share with people is that they need to

• start today
• start with something uncomplicated
• set a goal that can be evaluated daily
• make the change so easy that success is guaranteed

Start today because planning is not doing.

If you do not start today, when will you start? On Monday, so that you can kick-off with a fresh week? Next month when things have settled down and you have more time? After the kids go back to school and you have more time for yourself? Those are all good times to start your journey, but they are not today. And today is the best opportunity you have.

There should be no reason that you can not start today. I will remove some of the reasons you believe are obstacles in the way.

Avoid complexity.

The reason that complex planning should be avoided when you start is because you end up a with plan that a normal person, with a normal lifestyle can not implement. It is much better to start very simple and get positive momentum. As you start to implement the change, you can learn and adjust in real time. Testing small changes and iterating is a management process taken from the software development world and works well when trying to make a lifestyle change.

After you have been implementing the change for a short period of time, learn from the experience, adjust the plan and carry on. The real value is that you will be making decisions based on real experiences and not on theories and random testimonials of strangers.

It doesn’t take too many cycles before you have a new way of living. The surprising result will be something that feels like it should have taken a lot of hard work and planning to achieve. The truth is that it likely did take some hard work, but you spent your effort on creating change and momentum, while many others with the same goal are still planning on the best way to do it.

Create short feedback loops.

Do not set your first evaluation point a month after you get started. You need to have tighter feedback loops that enable better understanding. Gain information about how your behavior is impacting progress. When you set milestones too far away, it becomes easy to rationalize the lack of progress.

I recommend you have daily milestones. Weekly milestones would be the largest acceptable duration, however only if the chosen behaviors do not lend themselves to a shorter duration.

Guarantee your success.

In order to be successful over a long period of time, set yourself up for guaranteed success in the short term. When you find success with your outcome metrics early, you will start to build:

• Self confidence
• A new sense of identity
• Self efficacy
• Motivation

Changes in all four of those are critical to becoming a healthier and happier person. We all have a certain amount of resilience and capacity to self motivate. That capacity is often not sufficient to overcome consistent failure in the beginning. Finding recurring sources of external motivation can be difficult.

The better alternative is to create a goal for change that is nearly impossible to result in failure. When I share this concept with individuals I can often be met with skepticism. The goal might seem trivial. However, once they’ve steadily and progressively found success at these small changes, they begin to realize that they’ve started to develop a new lifestyle.

If you need one take away message from this article, it would be - start today. Go find the simplest and easy to execute activity you can, and go do it today. Then repeat it tomorrow.