“First step” a crucial factor in Change management

Life is all about changes. In fact, nothing is permanent in life except the constant changes. A positive change bounds to happen when the change works in your favour that aids in your growth. Being in the human development field, people come to me because they want to have a positive change in their life. Most of them have achieved what they really desired but not all of them. Here are few guidelines for those who really wanted to have “sure success” recipes to change their life for good.

Let the change that you deserve be in any particular dimension of your life. Say for example, better career, better health, wealth & better relationship management. What is more important is the way how you approach the change process. In particular, your “first step” for the change is a crucial element in determining the success.

Successful First Step: Your “first step” in your change process should always be successful.  “First step “is nothing but your first action in the change process. Let us assume that you wanted to have a great health. The first step is a simple movement to generate some energy in the body.  You need to pick up this movement in such a way that it is not exceeding your resource capabilities as well as not too small for you. In other words, it is a well-balanced selection of exercise appropriately selected for you.

Why we insist on the success? It is because; the experience of this exercise is stored in your memory which will have an impact when you repeat the exercise next time. The emotion attached to the exercise plays a key role in either continuing the exercise or discarding the exercise. A simple but successful pattern encourages us to perform exercise on regular basis. A wrong "first step" leads to a bad emotion that disowns the success pattern.

Pushing the Limit:  Growth can be defined as a change but is always happening in the positive direction. So, one has to step out from the comfort zone and step into the discomfort zone to experience the growth. The failure happens only when one overstep into the discomfort zone which really demands resource more than his present resource capabilities. This is one such typical pattern that leads to the failure. As a coach or trainer, it is the responsibility of the coach to take care of the clients to ensure that they travel in the path of the success pattern.

Brain circuitry: The motivational centre of the brain works based on the reward mechanism. Keep the exercises for the change neither trivial nor difficult so that the reward mechanism generates “feel good” hormones which motivate us to repeat the exercises. Repetition and regularity are the key factors to strengthen the neurological pathway. This neurological pathway eventually becomes our habits. This in fact is our success habit.

Law of accumulation: Big success can be easily achieved by adding up all the small steps of the successes. The exponential growth of success in fact is due to the effect of many different small actions but all are leading to their own minimal successes.

So, when you look for a change, it is important to understand your present resource capabilities and play the game where you step into your discomfort zone mindfully. Neither really overstepping nor underperforming but just setting the right balance. Do this continuously on a repeated basis to realise the big change.