Making Change Takes Practice

A few weeks ago, I played a few rounds of golf with my Dad when I was back in Pennsylvania. As has been the case for the last 25 years, most every time I hit a ball, it went off to the right.

Like, in the woods to the right.

It’s annoying when I play, but since I only play a few times a year, I don’t really expect myself to have enough skill to not chip over the green 17 times on the same hole. I mean I hope, but my expectations are low (just remember, if you set the bar low enough, you'll trip over it. Whatever that means...).

Finally, after my last time home, I decided to take a golf lesson. I like golf, and the only way I’m going to better develop the skill is to hire a coach and practice eight-hours a day a bit more.

I think if I asked most of you out there how you might get better at golfing, tennis, or speaking Italian you’d likely tell me the same thing – you’d hire a coach, take a lesson, and spend the summer in Tuscany (or take a course)...

And yet if I asked most of you out there what you needed to do to eat healthier, develop an exercise routine or kick an unwanted habit, you’d probably say that you just need to do it.

“I know what I need to do Kim, I just need to do it.”

But what if you treated the process of making change like a skill? What if you stopped looking at behavior change as an either/or affair, and approached it with more of the growth mindset?

If you’re unfamiliar, a growth mindset means that instead of passing or failing at something, you give yourself a grade of "not yet."

I haven’t failed when I’ve sliced the 7th golf ball of the day into the woods.

I just haven’t hit the fairway yet.

The bulk of my coaching is about behavior change. Yes, it’s about programming sets and reps and certain exercises for people, or helping them calculate macros and figure out what to eat. But it’s rarely just information that people need to implement change.

But even once we have a strategy to start changing, sometimes that strategy doesn’t stick. Sometimes three different strategies don’t stick. Often when that’s the case, we feel that our inability to either adopt a new behavior or stop an old one reflects a weakness in our character.

But what if we treated the process of change itself as a skill we needed to acquire? And like so many skills out there, some folks are going to do it a little more easily than another.

So if you want to make some big changes and haven't been able to do them yet, first of all, understand that you're still working on the skill.

And if you need help, let me know.